Playboy Panel: New Sexual Life Styles

Panelists

Madeline Davis, 33, is a past president of the Niagara Frontier District of the Mattachine Society, a homophile civil-rights organization. She was a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention, at which she made an impassioned plea for gay equality. After graduation (with a B.A. in English) from the University of Buffalo, where she also obtained a master's degree in library science, Ms. Davis appeared both as a solo folk singer and as a vocalist with the New Chicago Lunche rock band in such coffeehouses and night clubs as The Bitter End and The Gaslight in New York City and the Limelight Gallery in Buffalo. She was married heterosexually for a year and a half before coming out into Lesbianism, a life style she has followed for the past ten years. Her contributions to the gay movement have included many original songs, a one-act play, Liberella (a take-off on Cinderella in which the heroine runs off with the fairy godmother), and numerous talks before church and P. T. A. groups, the Lions and Elks clubs and college students. She currently lives in Buffalo with her Lesbian lover of two years and works full time as a librarian.

Betty Dodson, 44, is known for her efforts "to liberate women" through her work in the feminist movement and "to liberate society" through her explicitly erotic art. Ms. Dodson's celebration of the art of heterosexual and homosexual lovemaking, which depicts behavior ranging from orgies to masturbation, has been displayed in one-woman shows at such New York City galleries as the Wickersham. In June of this year, a retrospective of her work was presented at the Kronhausens' International Museum of Erotic Art in San Francisco. An ardent sexual libertarian (in 1971 she served as a judge at the second annual Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam), Ms. Dodson is currently conducting a "body and sex workshop" for women that she hopes will raise their sexual consciousness.

Al Goldstein, 37, is the cofounder and irrepressible editor of Screw, the nation's best-selling underground sex tabloid. Since its unique blend of raunch and humor first appeared on November 4, 1968—the day, Goldstein reminds us, that President Nixon was first elected—circulation has steadily grown to 122,000 copies a week. The rise has been accompanied by increased harassment from law-enforcement agencies, and Goldstein has made many court appearances to defend what he calls "The World's Greatest Newspaper" against a wide variety of obscenity charges. An erstwhile news photographer who once spent four days in a Havana jail falsely charged with—of all things—spying for the CIA, Goldstein is currently visible as "the King of the Philistines" in Screw's first film production, a hard-core epic titled It Happened in Hollywood. His company also publishes Gay, a weekly homosexual tabloid, and he lectures on the new sexuality at New York University.

Phyllis Kronhausen, 44, and Eberhard Kronhausen, 58, met and married 19 years ago, when they were both working toward their Ph.D.s in psychology at Columbia University. Since then, they have combined the private practice of family therapy and group guidance with unflagging public advocacy of sexual freedom in a wide variety of media. Their film credits include two feature-length documentaries that focus graphically on sexual behavior in Europe—Freedom to Love and Why Are They Doing It?—as well as a montage of vintage stag films titled Pornopop. The Kronhausens have also co-authored Pornography and the Law, The Sexually Responsive Woman, Erotic Fantasies, Erotic Bookplates and Erotic Art—the last an impressive two-volume compendium inspired by their extensive personal collection. They are the founders of the nonprofit International Museum of Erotic Art in San Francisco, which displays 1500 specific depictions of various sexual activities in drawings, graphics, painting, sculpture and objects ranging from Oriental and Indian erotica to contemporary underground cartoons. While Phyllis, author of Sex Histories of American College Men, was spending a month visiting Red China last spring as a member of an all-woman delegation headed by actress Shirley MacLaine, Eberhard was at work in their Malibu, California, apartment, polishing their latest collaborative effort—Sex for Fun and Profit.

Linda Lovelace, 22, has parlayed her virtuoso performance in the controversial hard-core film Deep Throat into near-universal recognition as one of the pop superstars of the Seventies. The very mention of her name at cocktail parties or on TV talk shows invariably precipitates either a spate of sword-swallowing jokes or a chorus of opprobrium. Screw magazine has called her "America's favorite mouth." Her manager calls Linda "the girl next door," to which one columnist added: "If you happen to live next door to a massage parlor." Since bridging the gap from stag films to full-length hard-core features, Miss Lovelace has written a provocatively titled autobiography, Inside Linda Lovelace. Drawing upon her extensive personal experience, she recently became a monthly columnist for Oui magazine, dispensing advice on sexual matters from analingus to zoophilia. Later this year or early next—depending on the consequences of the new obscenity rulings of the Supreme Court—audiences may again witness Linda's abilities, in Deep Throat II, a sequel to her remarkable feature-film debut.

John Money, M.D., 52, is a professor of medical psychology and associate professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he is in charge of the human-sexuality course for freshman medical students. Born in New Zealand. Dr. Money once lived with the Yolgnu peoples of Australia to study their mating and breeding habits. He has since dealt extensively with cases of hermaphroditism and was instrumental in founding the Office of Psychohormonal Research at Johns Hopkins, which has pioneered in cases of transsexual reassignment—whereby individuals are able to change their sex to conform to a new gender identity. The results of this extremely successful program are related in Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, a scholarly work co-authored by Dr. Money, who previously wrote Sex Errors of the Body. In a non-academic role, he testified last year for the defense in New York's celebrated obscenity prosecution of the film Deep Throat.

Troy Perry, 33, is the founder and pastor of Los Angeles' Metropolitan Community Church—whose congregation is entirely homosexual—as well as an extremely vocal spokesman for gay rights. A reporter once described the Reverend Perry as the Martin Luther King of the gay movement, to which he replied, "I don't know if I'd go that far. Just call me the Martin Luther Queen." Between picketing, parading, guest-preaching commitments and speeches at college campuses from coast to coast, he is chairman of The Committee on Sexual Law Reform and director of the Southern California Council on Religion and the Homosexual. A Pentecostal minister who attended Midwest Bible College in Summit, Illinois, and the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Mr. Perry was heterosexually married and had two children before admitting he was a homosexual and getting a divorce—events that are poignantly described in his autobiography, The Lord Is My Shepherd and He Knows I'm Gay. Since founding the Metropolitan Community Church in 1968, he has helped organize The Crisis Intervention Center—a telephone service for uptight homosexuals—and later started a gay counseling service in conjunction with the church, which also offers Sunday school for children of homosexuals.

Wardell B. Pomeroy, 59, is the co-author, with Alfred Kinsey, of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, the landmark volumes published by the Kinsey Institute, where he served for 20 years (seven of them as its director of field research). Holder of bachelor's and master's degrees from Indiana University and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, he has been, at various times in his career, a clinical psychologist at the Indiana Reformatory, an instructor in the psychology department at Indiana University and president of both the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex and the American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. Dr. Pomeroy presently serves as vice-president of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, diplomate of the American Board of Examiners in Professional (Clinical) Psychology and a fellow of the American Psychological Association. On his own, he has authored Boys and Sex, Girls and Sex and, his latest book, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research. Married for 37 years, he is on the staff at Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital and Cornell's Payne Whitney Clinic and, since 1963, has been in the private practice of marriage counseling and psychotherapy—dealing with, among other problems, specific sexual dysfunctions such as impotence and premature ejaculation, as well as homosexuality, transsexuality and transvestism.

Robert H. Rimmer, 56, has successfully combined the best of two worlds: commerce and literature. By day, he is the president of a 60-year-old family printing business located near Boston harbor. By night, he moonlights as a novelist in his Quincy, Massachusetts, study, exploring utopian alternatives to the nuclear family. His most popular fictional work, The Harrad Experiment, deals with a structured premarital life style pairing college roommates of opposite sexes. Selling more than 5,000,000 copies in all editions, Harrad has inspired a motion picture of the same title and a sequel volume, The Harrad Letters. A graduate of Bates College with a master's degree in business administration from Harvard, the prolific Rimmer has also written Proposition 31 (about group marriage), The Rebellion of Yale Marratt (bigamy), Thursday, My Love (open marriage), The Zolotov Affair (sexual economics), That Girl from Boston (a comic novel), You and I ... Searching for Tomorrow (another collection of letters) and, most recently, he has edited Adventures in Loving, a group of essays written by people living in alternate life styles.

William Simon, 43, holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago and for three years was a member of the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. Much in demand as an interpreter of the sexual frontier at universities and medical schools, as well as on the more erudite TV talk shows, Dr. Simon is currently program supervisor of sociology and anthropology at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, working in a U. S. Public Health Service-sponsored project focusing on youth and youth cultures. Dr. Simon, who participated in the Playboy Panel on homosexuality (April 1971), is the co-editor of The Sexual Scene and Sexual Deviance and the co-author (with John Gagnon) of Sexual Conduct: The Sources of Human Sexuality—which contains, says one scholar, "the most original thinking on sex since Freud."

Ernest Van Den Haag, 59, is a professor of social philosophy at New York University (where he earned his Ph.D.), a lecturer in sociology and psychology at the New School for Social Research and a practicing psychoanalyst. He has testified in nearly a dozen pornography trials, the most recent being New York's Deep Throat case, in which he spoke for the prosecution; and he has written extensively in Harper's, Atlantic and Commentary on sex education and political philosophy. Dr. van den Haag, who has lectured at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Colorado and Minnesota, is a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books include The Fabric of Society, Education as an Industry, Passion and Social Constraint, The Jewish Mystique and the recently published Political Violence and Civil Disobedience.

[Q] Playboy: In the 25 years since the publication of the first Kinsey report—and perhaps in part because of it—sex has become not merely respectable but almost unavoidable as a topic of conversation, magazine articles, how-to books, X-rated films, encounter therapy, even high school "visual aids." And subsequent surveys indicate that Americans aren't simply talking more about it; they're practicing what's being preached in ever-increasing numbers, despite rearguard actions still being waged by the thinning forces of sexual conservatism. According to reports in the media, these new patterns of behavior are forming into genuine life styles: suburban swinging, group and open marriage, communal living, self-proclaimed bisexuality and homosexuality. We've assembled a panel of participants in and observers of the sexual revolution in order to find out more about the nature and extent of these new life styles—if that's what they really are. Are they as widespread as we've been led to believe, or have they been exaggerated by the press?

[A] Goldstein: I think what we have is a media hype and a reflection of reality. It's certainly true that the ballyhoo about sexual experimentation is much greater than it used to be. But it's also true that after 2000 years of Biblical antisex propagandizing, people are getting sick of being told what to do. That means we have greater room for individuality, social and sexual. They go hand in hand—or should I say groin in groin?

[A] E. Kronhausen: I don't see how the idea that this is a media creation could even occur to anybody.

[A] P. Kronhausen: As a matter of fact, some of the reports in the media are really antisex.

[A] E. Kronhausen: Very true. Now, there's no doubt that the fringe expressions of this movement are sometimes bizarre, but it's a very broad movement, and it must be taken seriously. Many of the reasons for it have nothing to do with sex as such. They have to do with changes in our whole life styles—not only the individualism Al mentions but greater mobility, the fact that people are now concentrated more in large urban centers than on small farms and that they're living in small apartments rather than in large houses, the decline of religious and other social institutions that used to hold family units together, the widespread disappointment with what we may broadly call "the establishment"—all that enters into it.

[A] Pomeroy: I believe the increase in unconventional sexual behavior is genuine, not merely overreported—but it's less, percentagewise, than people think. What's significant is the increase in openness about it—people admitting they pursue behavior that was thought of as deviant.

[A] Perry: The most important development is that people are coming out of the closet. Joan Baez' admission of youthful homosexual relationships is a perfect example.

[A] Davis: Baez might have made a feeble effort to come out, but it never really happened. She probably scared herself with the admission of an early Lesbian relationship—and then copped out.

[A] Simon: And, unfortunately, Troy, Joan Baez is anything but the girl next door. God, that she were. But she is not. We have to be careful that we don't establish the sexual revolution as a social fact before it becomes a social reality. Let's remember that many of us here today are, in one sense or another, "sexual professionals," and as such we may help generate the open sex talk that we then proceed to observe. The latest data out of the computers indicate that a few more females are moving into premarital sex—but not as many as most people think. At the same time, there may actually be more late-teenaged male virgins than there used to be. Hell, despite the noise, about half the kids haven't even started mutual gropery by 16. Undoubtedly, some frontiers of sexual experimentation have expanded, but that doesn't mean conventional nervousness about sex—straight, gay or what have you—has disappeared. Along with the old nervousness about being sexual, we may be creating a new nervousness about not being sexual enough—making 17- or 18-year-olds feel that they're freaky because they haven't done it yet.

[A] Van Den Haag: Exactly. The fact that it's become not only respectable to be sensual but almost necessary is typical of the way we overdo things in America. Now it's prestigious to say "I enjoy sex." If you were to say "I don't really care," people would wonder what's wrong with you—and suggest you visit a psychiatrist. Yet I think a free and healthy person should be able to take sex or leave it, depending on what he feels. I happen to prefer sex to no sex, personally; but I was in prison for about three years when I lived in Italy, because I didn't get along with Mussolini. He did not, while I was in prison, provide for the gratification of my sexual desires. That certainly didn't please me, but it didn't do me any harm—and I'm still making up for it.

[A] Davis: You know, there's been a type of split mythology about Lesbians' sexuality. One version, usually found in pornography written by men, portrays Lesbians as totally sexual animals out for nothing but sexual satisfaction, which is untrue. The other version is that Lesbians are just lovely friends who hold hands and run through fields of daisies, and there's no sex. Like a Salem cigarette commercial. And that's just as untrue. We enjoy sex and friendship. But, like Dr. van den Haag, I believe sex is important in a person's life when it's readily available. When it's not available, it seems to me somewhat less important. I would feel much more deprived if I didn't have an emotional relationship than if I didn't have a sexual one. I prefer sex in my life, too, but I wouldn't die without it.

[A] Lovelace: I can't get along without sex at all. If you take away sex, and you don't have an orgasm daily, you become very nervous, very uptight. I do, anyway. I think there would be a lot fewer problems in the world if everybody enjoyed themselves sexually every day. And more and more people are.

[A] Dodson: One of the differences between our society today and that of 20 years ago is not simply that people are getting more sex but that there are a greater number of alternative sexual life styles available. In the Fifties, if a girl didn't get married, she was going to be a frustrated old maid. There was great pressure on her. She had no choice. Today, in the Seventies, some women are saying they're not interested in marriage. There are other options now; they're going to live some other way. We have millions of young people living together openly without marriage and satisfying one another sexually in ways their grandparents never dreamed of. Society has come to take it for granted.

[A] Money: Living together without marriage is not only one of the most popular new life styles, it's also one of the oldest. It's essentially substituting betrothal for marriage. In pre-18th Century Sweden, young couples used to be formally betrothed. But they didn't need to get legally married until the girl got pregnant.

[A] Goldstein: People used to live together in the Village, on the Left Bank, in the ghettos. Now it's happening in Levittown. But not to the majority. Most of my single male friends still spend their days looking to get laid, and the women I know are still looking to get married. It was the same 10, 20, 30 years ago. I don't see any major change.

[A] Pomeroy: The principal change is that it's more accepted now. After all, living together has some advantages over getting married. If one partner doesn't demonstrate concern, the other can get up and leave at any time, so they have to remain in more of a state of courtship. I've seen some so-called common-law marriages that worked out better than legal marriages for that reason.

[A] Rimmer: One of the things that absolutely fascinates me is the extent to which premarital cohabitation is being studied in the colleges. There's even a cohabitation-research newsletter. And they've had plenty to study. Last year at the University of Michigan, a student group called Xanadu set up a pattern of living with members of the opposite sex. Roommates were selected by pulling names out of a hat. This was very shocking to some parents and administrators. Yet I think it's a very valid idea; it lets you have the learning experience of being thrown in with another human being. You learn to see a man or a woman as a whole person.

[A] Van Den Haag: That is an argument against individual selection. It persuades me to return to arranged marriages, which have the advantages mentioned by Mr. Rimmer, and then some.

[Q] Playboy: How about traditional marriage? Is it breaking down?

[A] Pomeroy: If you mean by traditional marriage a dyadic relationship between a man and a woman who are legally married, then no, I don't think it's breaking down. There's more of it than ever, and it's here to stay. If you're thinking of traditional marriage as a male-dominated, chauvinistic institution, then yes, I think it's breaking down.

[A] Lovelace: I believe traditional marriages, and traditional courtships, are rapidly becoming things of the past, because of premarital sex. By that I mean sex for a year or two before marriage, and I think as that increases, courtship decreases. But I believe premarital sex is making stronger marriages, even if they're not traditional ones.

[A] Perry: People are changing. Women are looking around and saying, "Wait just a minute. This business of my having to abide by rules and regulations while the husband is a free moral agent is bullshit. What's good for the gander is good for the goose. You will treat me as an equal, as a human being, as a helpmate—not just as something to be used in the bedroom at your convenience."

[A] Rimmer: That's why marriages are under stress—and splitting up. Divorce is rampant. But that doesn't say we're not remarrying. As a matter of fact, we've become a great marrying society.

[A] Pomeroy: My contention is that the high divorce rate proves how much better marriages are. Now that people are freer to get divorced, the ones who stay married don't have to; they stay married because they're happy.

[A] Dodson: I would never get married again. It's a stupid and crippling life style, especially for women. Unfortunately, marriage is the only formal protection a woman has if she has children and is financially dependent, and I don't think that's much protection; she often ends up with all the responsibility—including financial. Marriage is essentially a license to fuck, but the institution of marriage is really based upon sexual repression, and the hook is romantic love.

[A] Perry: Well, many need and want marriage for reasons other than to legalize intercourse or to have children, which is the other big reason you hear about. For years, gay couples have been denied the right to any sort of ceremony. I find, more and more in our community, large numbers of couples who have been together for long periods of time and want to formalize the relationship. We do this through services of holy union in our church.

[A] Davis: I don't think the fact that two people love each other needs to be formalized. Being married means being blessed by the power structure, by the establishment, and I don't want that. I don't want this fucked-up society to say my relationship is OK. I'd feel really weird, probably, if they said to me, "OK, within the framework of our beliefs, we will allow you to love each other." I don't need that.

[A] Goldstein: Well, I'm an expert on marriage. I'm on my third one now. At one point, as a matter of fact, I was married to more than one woman at the same time. My second wife was an airline stewardess, and I couldn't fly discount unless I could produce a marriage certificate. So we were married before my divorce from my first wife, a Jewish princess, was final. I would justify my bigamous marriage on a very pragmatic level: It saved me a lot of money. The third time around, in my most recent marriage, I found another Jewish princess. Anyway, I've been re-evaluating the institution of marriage in terms of my other experiences—orgies, uninvolved sex, and so on. And I've decided I really like the values marriage offers. I like coming home to somebody who loves me. When we entwine during the night, I'm not one of 19 studs who have passed between her thighs in the last four days. When it's bad, I hate marriage, but when it's good, it's magnificent.

[A] Simon: I'm truly glad you said that, Al. We often forget that people can't change as fast as styles and fashions change. Or, for that matter, even values. We are all historic entities, trapped by our own pasts.

[A] Lovelace: Well, I think it's ridiculous, Al, to say that when marriage is going well it's great, and when it's going bad you hate it. If you were really into marriage, it would be a magnificent state, however it was going.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't the increasing incidence—or at least acceptance—of marital infidelity today indicate that the traditional arrangement isn't working as well as it used to?

[A] Van Den Haag: That may be true, but I don't know that we really have any evidence of increasing infidelity. It might be, as you suggest, that the attitude toward it has changed, that people are somewhat more permissive in respect to adultery than they used to be.

[A] Rimmer: That is definitely true. A license to have outside sex almost goes along with the license in many marriages today.

[A] Money: Consensual adultery is a marvelous invention for some people. But others are absolutely unequipped emotionally to cope with it; they'll be lucky if they can cope with even the suggestion of it in their children or grandchildren. Still, many have discovered that consensual adultery doesn't have to jeopardize the family unit at all.

[A] Van Den Haag: If this means no more than simply saying that occasional infidelity doesn't necessarily ruin a marriage, that's no more than common sense, and I would certainly agree. A marriage in which one of the partners has been occasionally unfaithful is nonetheless a marriage. But if a couple systematically permits or encourages either partner to be unfaithful, then it means that they are not fully committed to each other—are not really married, even though they pretend to be and, perhaps, want to be. The man or woman who finds it necessary to have regular affairs outside marriage obviously is not fulfilled in the marriage—either because his partner is not ideal or because he finds himself incapable of being sufficiently fulfilled by that person or, for that matter, by a series of persons, or perhaps by anyone. Perhaps he—or she—is incapable of the commitment that, by definition, marriage must be.

[Q] Playboy: Do affairs ever help marriage?

[A] Van Den Haag: Anyone who says an affair always helps a marriage is wrong; but anyone who says it's always bad for that marriage is equally wrong. Often, however, the affair indicates that something is amiss—although it neither cures it nor causes it.

[A] Pomeroy: I would say that in about five percent of marriages, extramarital intercourse can be helpful—a positive factor. I think in maybe half the marriages, the spouse doesn't know about the extramarital intercourse, and in most of these cases it's a neutral factor. In nearly half the remaining marriages, it can be a very destructive thing, because of our culture, all sorts of jealousies and feelings of possessiveness.

[A] E. Kronhausen: You may be right, statistically, speaking. But we wouldn't want to leave it there and just accept the status quo; I'm sure you'd agree with that. Phyl and I are interested in promoting social change—in turning the statistics around instead of just quoting them. We believe outside relationships frequently help sexually troubled marriages simply because of what is called the transfer effect. Once you're excited from the group situation or from an individual affair, that new sexual attraction very often transfers into the marriage relationship. But even if it doesn't, let's accept it as OK. It doesn't mean you love the person you live with—your primary partner—any less.

[A] Goldstein: Well, if my wife cheated, I'd kill her. If I cheat, of course, it's cool—although if she catches me, she'll do what every Jewish princess does: cut my balls off. I believe she's part of my property. I mean, I am a sexist. And since I pay the bills, I feel I own her, the way I own my car, and I don't lend my car out to people. We've come to our agreements willingly, so I think I'm entitled to this uneven relationship. But it is unfair; I can cheat and she can't. I mean, it's a classical marriage. It's so bourgeois it amazes me. I keep telling myself I'm part of a sex revolution and yet my wife and I fight about whether I should wear a wedding band or not.

[A] Davis: I wish I had a knife long enough to cut those balls off for her. There are so many men who feel that way, it's disgusting. I feel very badly for your wife, Al. I have a lot more empathy with her than I do with you; she's a woman. I'd like to sit around and have some long talks with her. I guess I'd like to take her into my life for a little while and show her how nice it can be to be an equal person in an equal relationship. I don't care if you do pay her bills; you're sitting on her head.

[A] Dodson: True. But Al, you're so honest about being a sexist pig that you're actually a magnificent walking, talking advertisement for women's liberation. Keep up the good work!

[A] Perry: Al, are you really sure that you're the editor of Screw? I've read your paper and I find it hard to believe you're the same person. You sound like the preacher who says "Do as I say" but doesn't practice what he preaches. No wonder so many women, both heterosexual and homosexual, are being turned off by the idea of even talking to a man. Maybe you should drop your wife and try having a loving relationship with some of your other property, like your sofa.

[A] Goldstein: I've never met a sofa I didn't like.

[A] Rimmer: My God, Al, you amaze me, too. In the bibliography of one of my books—You and I ... Searching for Tomorrow—I urged the readers to subscribe to Screw, because it seemed to offer the potential for a Chaucerian-Rabelaisian kind of humor that is completely missing in our culture. Now I wonder if I'm wrong; perhaps they'll preserve your bones, like Norman Mailer's, in some museum along with the dinosaurs' and pterodactyls'—so that mothers of the future can warn their children: Thus perished male chauvinist pigs!

[A] E. Kronhausen: I don't see, Al, how you can sit there and say such things—that you feel your wife is your property, like your car. I feel embarrassed for you. How can you kid yourself that you're part of the sexual revolution with attitudes like that? Moreover, as a psychologist, I'd have to warn you that anyone leading that kind of schizoid existence, believing one thing and living another, is treading on very thin ice from a mental-health point of view.

[A] Simon: You know, Al, being a sexist isn't like being a Rotarian or something. It's increasingly a very sick condition for both men and women. What you're really saying—if you mean it—is that you have to pay for your sex, even that which you get in the marital bed. And you get your fidelity on the same basis that you get your sex—for cash and other services rendered.

[A] Goldstein: That's absolutely true. Everything has its price. Let's not bullshit ourselves that marriage, one-night stands, orgies or anything else don't have their price. I just want my wives to know the terms of the sale before they sign the contract.

[A] Van Den Haag: Traditionally, it's much more difficult for a man to countenance an unfaithful wife than vice versa. In the past, female infidelity could—and was likely to—lead to pregnancy, and husbands wanted to know whose children they were bringing up. But there may also be something in the nature of men that makes it harder for them to be committed to one woman than it is for a woman to be committed to one man. That's an open question. It doesn't follow from the fact that you desire equality that God made an equal world. God wasn't egalitarian to begin with. For all we know, He wasn't even a Democrat.

[A] Dodson: It's no news if somebody wants to embrace the double standard. Most men operate that way. I just can't see any sexual health to it. All I see is that it creates bad vibrations, and it really separates a man and a woman. That "something" in the nature of man that makes it harder for him to be committed to a woman is simply being sexual. If women were more sexual and financially independent, it would be just as difficult for us to be committed to one man. But I don't think women should impose a reverse double standard, either. I feel just as strongly about women who want to fuck around with guys outside their marital unit and don't want their husbands to have the same privilege. We've got to start being honest about our sexuality. The marriages I see that are expanding—or at least breathing—are the ones in which both the woman and the man are trying to get some sexual variety outside the marriage while maintaining the pair-bond unit. Together but separate. The open-ended marriage.

[A] Perry: Open marriage is typical of most gay couples—always has been. The heterosexuals are finally waking up to it. In an open marriage, you know that some sex act with some other person at some other time or place isn't going to destroy your relationship. And you don't have to lie about it or feel guilty about it. When you lie, your partner becomes jealous, upset. Such a relationship is destroyed if the partners can't talk it out, communicate.

[A] Davis: Open marriage hasn't been as prevalent in Lesbian relationships as in male gay ones. Lesbian relationships have always tended to be much more monogamous. Women are conditioned to be monogamous and men are conditioned to sow their wild oats. We're not born that way, but we're trained that way.

[A] Simon: The most successful gay marriages—among males, anyway—are between two individuals with independent identities and independent commitments to the world. Such a marriage is not only open, it's also more voluntary than most straight marriages. In a sexist society, when a marriage dissolves, the woman who has been trapped into running the household has to face a devastating crisis. She has to become something the world worked so very hard to prevent her from ever being: an autonomous individual. So it's understandable that extramarital sex, if it is seen as a marriage-destroying force, is viewed with considerable nervousness. Even for the gays, there is the constant fear that sex might degenerate into love, leaving the other partner on the cold outside.

[Q] Playboy: Degenerate?

[A] Simon: Sure. Most of us have problems of handling lust. We must justify it, particularly to ourselves. We have to endow the person who turns us on with all kinds of magnificent attributes; a beautiful body is transformed into a beautiful person by an act of will. Selling our own motives to ourselves, we invent love. Lots of people fall into love not headfirst but genitals first.

[A] Goldstein: With or without emotional involvement, I'm sure most married people are involved with some kind of outside sex. What's incredible is that so many married people aren't fucking each other anymore. My wife and I know one guy who's been married 23 years; he gets drunk all the time and isn't interested in fucking, so his wife is horny. But he's Italian, and if he caught his wife fucking around, he'd kill her. So she's not getting laid. And there's this newlywed friend of mine. Before he got married, he said sex with his girlfriend was wild. Now that he's married, he has hard-on problems. I think it's his way of telling his wife, "OK, you've trapped me; now fuck you. You're not going to get my cooperation. I'll give you a limp cock."

[A] Lovelace: I think your friend, like many people, has mistaken a sexual feeling for love. I believe people are turned on when they're single by the idea that someone might catch them—find out they're balling. They believe this arousal is love, so they get married—and there goes the excitement of being caught, and the good hard-ons. It's at this point that people assume they're out of love.

[A] Goldstein: Well, I'm lucky. My wife is really the greatest hump I've ever had. But I still like variety.

[A] Rimmer: I feel that marriage has to be opened up, but in order to do it, we've got to start back a little bit—start with the initial conditioning of people. If you come out of a monogamous family and go through your typical college experience—whether you're living with someone or not—and then you finally go into a monogamous marriage, at some point you're acting out the whole structure of what's happened in the past. That's why I think in the future we'll structure premarital situations, probably at the college undergraduate level, in which students will have a good opportunity to live intimately with more than one member of the opposite sex. Without commitment, as part of the accepted structure. It's the idea, of course, expressed in my novel The Harrad Experiment.

[A] When I go to lecture at colleges now, some people tell me that coed dormitories have made Harrad old hat. But actually, these kids who are living together in coed dorms are living in the old one-to-one relationships; if they split, it's traumatic. We need to create the kind of structure in which the relationship could come apart easily, that would let a youngster room with a member of the opposite sex—learn about the particular needs of another human being—without that trauma. Without that prior learning experience, I would think open marriage is just words. Most people don't know how to cope with it.

[A] Money: If I were designing the sex lives of young people in their late high school or college years, I, too, would allow them not just to learn about but to experience a variety of sexual relationships—until they established one that appeared to be ultimately capable of enduring.

[A] Van Den Haag: I think we are lucky that neither Dr. Money nor anyone else is "designing the sex lives of young people." They prefer acting spontaneously to having their lives designed or planned for them.

[A] Lovelace: That's for sure. Nobody plans my life for me. I've been with my manager, Chuck, for a very long time, and we do have an open relationship. Since we've been together, we've never been apart for more than an hour. He sees other chicks, but when he does, I'm with him. And if I'm with other dudes, he's with me, too. I never go off alone in another room with somebody else, and the same with him. We share everything. I don't see anything wrong with married couples, or people who're living together, experiencing other people. Part of being with somebody is trusting him. If you're subject to fits of jealousy, you're just insecure.

[A] P. Kronhausen: I guess you could say my husband and I have an open-ended marriage, but I don't even like to use the term marriage. To Ebe and me it's irrelevant whether we're married or not. It's just never been important to us. We married because of the legal requirements, essentially because it was easier to work professionally. To us, the important thing is our working relationship.

[A] Van Den Haag: It's interesting that you don't like to use the term marriage. As I said before, I think the open-ended relationship is actually a denial of marriage, not an expansion of it. If you enter the marriage with the idea that you aren't committed, for heaven's sake, what are you doing?

[A] P. Kronhausen: I didn't say we weren't committed. Anyone who knows us realizes that commitment is the basis of our relationship.

[A] Goldstein: Intellectually, I, too, disagree with Dr. van den Haag. But emotionally, I realize that we have a tremendous heritage of insecurity. I mean, I know I would be a better person if my wife had outside sexual activity. But that's on the theoretical level. On the practical level, I would feel frightened—although I know there wouldn't be any reason to be, since I stay with my wife in spite of my sexual experiences with other people, and that my love for my wife has nothing to do with, say, Linda Lovelace's technical virtuosity. You'll excuse me, Linda, but for me my wife is better.

[A] Lovelace: People who own Fords think Fords are the best-made cars.

[A] Goldstein: But I'm so much a product of my male conditioning that I fear some better tongue, some better cock will come along and I'll lose my wife.

[A] Davis: In a way, we have something in common. Intellectually, I can see that open marriage might be a healthy thing. But I don't think I could participate in it. I'm possessive. I'm jealous. I try desperately not to be, but I am. My lover and I have talked at length about the possibilities of making ours a nonmonogamous relationship; it would make us able to relate to all kinds of people, bring all kinds of new experiences into our lives. Yet we know we couldn't do it. We didn't begin our relationship within that structure and it seems impossible to impose a different set of rules on our relationship at this point.

[A] Rimmer: I can give you an example of how one open-ended marriage works. I know a guy who has a radio show in Los Angeles. He and his wife have two kids, and they divide the baby-sitting chores equally. They have an agreement that they can't bring other people home, but they can have any outside experiences they want, without any accountability. She's aware that he's been sleeping with some girl in the studio, because he's gone a couple of nights a week and doesn't come back until the next morning. He and his wife attended a party in my honor at the Beverly Hilton Hotel; another guest was a handsome movie producer. My friend's wife took one look at him and boom! I could feel this thing between them. By 11 o'clock, she and the producer had disappeared. Later, I asked her husband, "Where has your wife gone?" He said, "Oh, I guess she's gone with the producer." "Are you going to wait for her?" I asked. "Oh, no, she won't be home." I would guess that kind of relationship wouldn't persist over a period of ten years or so. Presumably, there's no jealousy between them, and there may well not be. But I don't think their commitment is strong enough to hold them together, ultimately, if either discovered a person he or she would rather be with for, say, a week or two weeks rather than just a night.

[A] E. Kronhausen: One of the things that happens so often in divorce, Hollywood style, is that people feel they've fallen out of love, or that there's something wrong with their marriage, because of a lessening of sexual interest in each other or a temporary attraction to another sex partner. Most of these cases are symptomatic of what the Kinsey people called psychological sex fatigue. In a stable chimpanzee population of, say, half a dozen males and half a dozen females, the rate of sexual activity tends to drop off after a while. If you introduce another female, the rate will quickly rise—only to level off again. The same thing happens with human beings. The effect of the same stimuli tends to diminish over time.

[A] Lovelace: That's why it's good to open up your relationship to outsiders. There's an added mystery when the other person is someone you don't know. If you're with the same person constantly, there's a limit to how much of a different experience you can have. There's more to it if you're with other people—just something extra.

[A] E. Kronhausen: That's not true for everybody, of course. We've studied quite a number of couples who seem to be perfectly monogamous. For one reason or another, they are happy and active sexually with each other over a long period, without the need of other stimuli. Now, that's beautiful. Some of them achieve that happiness with the help of erotica, some with the help of reading, some by varying their sexual techniques. But—unfortunately, perhaps—these are rather the exceptions that confirm the rule.

[A] Van Den Haag: Happiness is never attached to or excluded by any particular form. Saint Simeon Stylites, who lived on top of a column for 30 years, might, for all I know, have been happy on that column. There are millions of ways of being happy or unhappy, and everyone has to find his own. Still, the majority of mankind is more comfortable, if not happier, being married than not being married.

[A] Pomeroy: And a stable marriage can tolerate a great deal of outside sex—in a limited way, seen only as insertion of a penis into a vagina. The problem with most extramarital intercourse has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with emotional involvements, and that's where a stable marriage can get into trouble. And that's one of the advantages of ritualized swinging; it's very strictly limited to penis and vagina.

[A] Rimmer: The average swinger is very much against both commitment and involvement. The male, particularly, doesn't mind if you screw his wife and he screws yours, but he doesn't want you to fall in love with her. He doesn't want to have anyone else find her interesting as a human being.

[A] Simon: To me, this middle-American attempt at swinging doesn't represent so much the future as a kind of dead-end version of the present. So many of these people strike me as individuals who have made it to a mass-produced version of the American dream: a suburban house, two cars and two kids. But, having made it, they find an absence of pleasure and excitement, coupled with a fear of growing old and somehow having missed something. Without a capacity to question the system as such, or to break away and find a new commitment to life, they shore up their present banal existences with sex: sex neatly segregated from the rest of their social lives. And they work at swinging with the same energy with which they initially pursued the more standard version of the American dream.

[A] Pomeroy: And there are very definite ground rules for this sort of activity: no dates outside the party and, in a simple swap situation, no assignations between the nonmarital partners when the spouse isn't present. And, equally important, no talking of love or affection while you're having sex, although comments on sexual prowess are fine.

[Q] Playboy: When many swinging couples get back together to discuss their experiences, according to some studies, they often belittle the performance of their extramarital sex partners in order to diminish jealousy.

[A] P. Kronhausen: That has certainly not been our experience as, shall we say, participant-observers in numerous group-sex situations in both Europe and America. Quite the contrary; we have frequently witnessed husbands and wives or lovers falling happy and exhausted into each other's arms after a particularly gratifying sexual experience with someone else. And why shouldn't that be so? If you really love somebody, anything that makes him or her happy ought to make you happy, too, shouldn't it?

[A] Simon: Should it? The puritan world made us strangers to ourselves by requiring that we deny our own feelings and desires. Sexual utopians tend to do the same thing, by holding out a model of sexual fulfillment that few, if any, people may be capable of achieving. Feelings like jealousy and insecurity come out of our own experience and are not easily denied—nor should they be, as a matter of fact. Better that they be expressed than that they survive as self-doubt or as unstated accusations against one's partner.

[A] E. Kronhausen: The problem of jealousy exists to a certain extent even in group-sex situations, though in all the years we've been involved in it in England, France and America, I can think of only one or maybe two serious instances where a marriage or pair bond actually broke up on account of it. What you find more often in group-sex situations is a kind of anxiety—which is quite different from jealousy—that maybe you'll find yourself, as a male, literally outfucked by other men with a much higher potency than yours.

[A] Simon: Everyman as superstud, with orgasm as the ultimate defeat.

[A] P. Kronhausen: Women can become nervous, too, when they see other women reaching orgasm much more easily than may be true from their own experience, or being capable of multiple orgasms, while they may not be, and things like that. I think that's much more important than purely physical comparisons of your own body with those of others. In fact, in group-sex situations, very often the older, more experienced and perhaps less beautiful women are more in demand than the younger, more attractive girls who still have a lot to learn and aren't really with it yet.

[Q] Playboy: Who usually takes the lead in involving a couple in swinging? The male or the female?

[A] Pomeroy: Commonly, they get involved at the instigation of the male—but the female perpetuates it after he's lost interest. She's hooked, as it were.

[A] Dodson: It's important that the woman not be coerced. Some men let the woman know that if she won't go with them, they'll find someone who will. When I set up a party, I nearly always talk to the women, not the husbands.

[A] Simon: I can understand that. For many men it becomes a matter of barter, trading women.

[A] Davis: Yes, I think men really like the idea of sharing their property with other guys—and showing the guys that they've got higher-quality property than someone else has.

[A] Simon: But the nice thing about swinging, for the women as well as the men involved, is that it establishes a situation where the risks of rejection are relatively small. It also lightens the burden of guilt, by making a wife or girlfriend an accomplice and, as Dr. Pomeroy suggests, one who may feel much more at home with it, ultimately, than he does.

[A] Rimmer: Once the female gets involved in swinging, she often discovers that the sex is better than what she's been having with her own male; better, in fact, than she could get from any one male.

[A] P. Kronhausen: It's fun. You go there just to have a good time. If we could get just one message across to the young—through the International Museum of Erotic Art in San Francisco, for example—it would be that sex should be for recreation, not procreation.

[A] Simon: I don't want to come on like the world's greatest square, but much of this talk sounds like little more than the dubious joys of mindless organ grinding, with an occasional overlay of humanistic psychology. It sounds hygienic, almost athletic. There is something frighteningly passionless about it.

[A] Van Den Haag: And, even worse, emotionless. Group sex is, in effect, a masturbatory exercise; you get someone else to stimulate your sensations without touching your emotions. Sex used as a diversion, particularly in a group situation, is not the kind of sex I would like.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever tried it?

[A] Van Den Haag: No, I haven't. I'm reasonably sure I'd be unlikely to enjoy it, because I'm fairly convinced I have only one penis—and I can do only one thing at a time—nor have I ever found myself terribly interested in watching others. Still, if someone were to invite me to a group-sex party, I might go, probably out of curiosity.

[A] P. Kronhausen: With your attitudes, who'd invite you?

[A] E. Kronhausen: Actually, those gatherings can be amusing as well as erotic. We've often laughed our fool heads off at a sex party. When you've got 20 people on a bed, something funny is bound to happen—like someone's falling off. Or making a human pyramid and having the whole thing collapse.

[A] P. Kronhausen: I'll never forget the party we went to last spring, where the men turned on the TV to watch a basketball game. They were actually carrying portable sets from room to room while there was sex going on. Ebe and I couldn't believe it. When it came to sports or sex, they chose sports.

[A] Van Den Haag: I just changed my mind. I think now I wouldn't go if someone did invite me.

[Q] Playboy: What's the usual ratio of males to females at a group-sex party?

[A] Pomeroy: Usually, people come in pairs, but an ideal swinging party has about twice as many males as females, because females can keep going longer. They usually wear the males out.

[A] P. Kronhausen: That's a typical male fantasy.

[A] Dodson: True. Men can keep going, too—if they're liberated enough to realize that sex is more than just a hard-on and penetration. Touching, looking, sucking, playing and even listening are all sexual and pleasurable.

[Q] Playboy: What kinds of erotica are used to get a group-sex party going?

[A] Pomeroy: Porn movies are very common at swinging parties. The films are much like swinging: terribly genital, very specific, nonemotional. They also help people develop their fantasies, give them ideas of what to do sexually.

[A] E. Kronhausen: Well, I'm not in the habit of going to sex parties with a tally sheet, but my guess would be that sex films have played a role in no more than ten percent of all the parties I've attended. And, more often than not, they have a decided turn-off rather than turn-on effect under these circumstances. After all, if you have live stimuli all around you, who needs people fucking on the screen? The only thing I've ever seen working fine in such a situation were some really funny sex cartoons that made everybody laugh—helped them relax and not take sex so darned seriously.

[A] Lovelace: Well, some people need the stimulation of a film and others don't. Some guys are breast men, leg men, ass men, belly men or ear freaks; others like movies. The majority of people who watch a so-called porn film are putting themselves into it, feeling that it's happening to them instead of to the person on the screen.

[A] But with or without porn films, I really don't dig the swinging scene. Swinging is middle-class America getting together on Friday night for two hours in bed, just because it's something to do. I don't think I could get into that, like answering an ad and going to a party. My friends and I are totally involved in a circle of people who ball each other, but our relationship is based on more than just sex. We do all kinds of things together. Swingers are strictly into balling; the guy wants to meet new chicks and the wife is past 30 or 40, so she's into getting laid any way she can. That's not my thing.

[A] E. Kronhausen: Nor ours. The middle-American type of swingers you're talking about aren't very exciting people to begin with, and I don't expect that they're any more exciting or passionate or imaginative in their private sex life at home than they are in a group. On the other hand, let me assure you that Phyllis and I have had some very exciting, passionate and even ecstatic experiences in connection with group sex—and I'm using the word ecstatic in its true literal meaning, as including religious or transcendental states of mind—which I treasure among the high points of my whole life.

[Q] Playboy: Is there any evidence, as some zealots insist, that participating in an orgy can help a sexually troubled marriage?

[A] Lovelace: I don't think so. It would probably be bad for the ordinary middle-class American couple. Orgies, I believe, are for those with no hang-ups. If the couple with the problem were to get together with another couple, it would be much better for them than going to an orgy.

[A] Goldstein: Well, when my second wife and I were going through a bad period sexually, we went to an orgy with some hope of bringing fire to the relationship. But it didn't. Some people hold up orgies as a panacea, like the patent medicines of the 19th Century, guaranteed to cure liver disease. I don't think an orgy will save a bad marriage—or kill a good one.

[A] Dodson: But perhaps an orgy can help end a bad marriage—right, Al? That party was at my place and, as I recall, you were huddled in the darkest corner until I lovingly brought you out.

[A] Goldstein: Sure I was. It was a little strange meeting the Kronhausens there. From their books, I had always imagined them as an erudite duo. I didn't see them as fuckers. It was a very humanizing experience for me to realize that the people in the sex revolution are really into fucking, not just writing about it.

[A] Dodson: Everybody's first orgy is mind-boggling. I remember mine. Half of me was thrilled, the other half terrified. I didn't know what the social rules were. What should I wear? How should I get out of what I wear? What if somebody comes over whom I really don't want to ball? What finally happened, though, was that I had a marvelous time.

[A] Lovelace: To be honest with you, I don't remember my first group experience very vividly. There were just two men and two women in an apartment. We had worked together all day and just decided we'd get together that night. I remember really enjoying myself—and I have ever since.

[A] E. Kronhausen: Our own introduction to group sex was rather humorous. Pornography and the Law had just been published, and this couple came ringing our doorbell in La Jolla, asking us point-blank whether we practiced what we were preaching about sexual liberation. I said we were trying to. Well, they asked, had we ever "partied"? We had to admit that the opportunity had never presented itself to us. So they invited us the following weekend to a small party, and they couldn't get over the fact that we didn't have any problems. It didn't take us long to get right into it. We thought it was the most natural thing in the world.

[A] P. Kronhausen: Our next group-sex party was in Paris. We were picked up in the Bois de Boulogne. There was, and still is, a routine; you drive down the main avenue of the Bois, which traverses the length of the woods. Just about any night of the week, especially in summer, people drive slowly along and blink their lights. After a while, you get a trail of three, four, twelve cars, and eventually you stop to discuss who's got the biggest apartment, and that's where you go.

[A] Simon: Be careful. Given the size of Playboy's readership, you may create a fantastic traffic jam in the Bois de Boulogne.

[A] P. Kronhausen: That would never stop the French. Anyway, they eventually wind up all fucking in the same room. That's substantially different from most American swingers' protocol. The French find the sights and sounds of other people an aphrodisiac, but for the middle-American type of swingers, that's almost taboo. It's very much OK, however, among the more sophisticated groups in this country.

[A] Dodson: If you're interested in something different, let me tell you about some experimental parties I had last year. Some orgies were being held by women, but I realized we were inviting the people and providing a setting, running the party—but not running the sex. The men were still running the fuck, establishing the framework of the sex. So I set up a sexual-consciousness-raising group with women who had shared group sex. We conjectured what we would like to do sexually: act out our fantasies, do sexual guerrilla theater, have sensory encounter, do erotic massage. Women seldom allow themselves the privilege of being able to state their pleasure. I said I'd like to have three beautiful men standing in front of me, masturbating to orgasm while I watched. I finally got to watch two men making love and it was a fantastic sexual turn-on.

[A] At a subsequent party, we women brought vibrators and we initiated sensual massage and masturbation. We also showed the men the best positions for fucking while using the vibrator. Like, you can have penetration and use the vibrator on your clitoris and the man can feel the vibrations inside you. One of the exciting developments was that as the women became more aggressive and said what they wanted, there were more female orgasms. Women were having orgasms from direct clitoral stimulation, and they could do it for themselves as well as with a partner.

[A] Goldstein: I've got to give Betty credit for teaching me the wonders of the vibrator and how great it feels under my balls. Vibrators always used to be a no-no, something you had to buy under the counter in a sex-book store. Now the poshest drugstores on Fifth Avenue are selling them for $2.95. You've probably noticed they never sell square vibrators; they're all cock-shaped, which probably accounts for a lot of wives' smiling even when their husbands aren't around. The marketing of dildos is another step forward for middle America. In fact, the ultimate dildo would be for insecure people like me, who need an emotional accompaniment to their raw sexuality. It would have a voice box inside, saying "I love you, darling." I think it's healthy that we now take such sexual hardware for granted, further opening up the anatomy to violation and pleasure. Items like these are helping us to stop deifying sex, which should be considered just another part of life, another joy.

[A] Davis: I don't know any women who use apparatus. Personally, I find such devices a little inhuman. I guess I'm just really hung up on flesh, as opposed to plastic and metal. But with or without vibrators, the mythology is that Lesbians can't live without being fucked—that women can't live without being fucked—and that's absolutely ridiculous. Women don't necessarily need intromission. The seat of women's sexuality is clitoral. If more women realized that, they might develop a lot more power and autonomy in their relationships.

[A] Perry: From the experiences of homosexuals who come to me for counseling, it would seem that vibrators and dildos are often used in group-sex situations. Some individuals especially like vibrators for anal intercourse. If they're 69ing, for instance, they might use vibrators on each other simultaneously. Their attitude is that if it helps heighten the sex act, then that's cool.

[A] Lovelace: It really depends on how good the vibrator is. I have a vibrator that's not one of those long thin ones you put inside your vagina but the kind that you attach different things to the end of—more of a clitoral vibrator. It's really fantastic.

[Q] Playboy: Many of you have painted a glowing picture of group sex. In fairness, shouldn't you deal with some of the drawbacks.

[A] Simon: Well, first the Kronhausens create a traffic jam. Now the rest of you have made a substantial contribution to the energy crisis. I can almost see public-service announcements asking people at orgies not to turn on their vibrators during peak hours or when the temperature goes over 90 degrees.

[A] Pomeroy: Good idea. But the primary negative aspect of group sex, as I see it, is the danger of emotional involvement—the problem of meeting somebody you tune into and then get emotionally involved with. When I talk about this with my patients, I always emphasize this very strongly—that they're sort of playing with dynamite. This is also a part of their life that they really have to cover up from their children, and even from their straight friends.

[A] E. Kronhausen: One of the greatest drawbacks in group sex is a lot more basic—and pervasive: infection, whether it's a fungus or trichomoniasis or a bacterial infection like gonorrhea. We've never seen a case of syphilis in any group anywhere in the world, but there have been plenty of the other problems, and that is really a turn-off.

[A] P. Kronhausen: Essentially, infection happens because of lack of sex education. First of all, most men refuse to believe that they can get trichomoniasis, a common parasitic infestation. Because it usually manifests itself as a vaginitis, they think that's a woman's disease; yet they're frequently the carriers and they will rarely go for treatment, even though it's easy to cure. The point is that even in these swinging groups, people are ignorant. They're not educated about treating themselves. In fact, prostitutes are cleaner, because they've been educated to take good care of themselves. Often, people in swinging groups don't have frequent checkups, which are essential.

[A] Lovelace: If somebody's worrying about getting V. D., he's probably just fucking people who aren't knowledgeable. I've never come across the problem, to be honest with you. I know the people I'm involved with.

[A] Dodson: Several years ago, when I first got involved in group sex, I thought, "Oh, this is going to save the world, this is the way, this is what I've been looking for." I had this enormous enthusiasm. Then after a while, I started looking around and I noticed the same problems that occur in bedrooms across the country were happening at orgies. Like the double standard. And women not having orgasms. And men hooked on their cocks, terrified whether or not they were going to get an erection. Guys who think that sexuality is based only on hard-ons. Because of all that, there can be negative vibrations at orgies. You often find the problems that exist in the pair bond, or in the marital unit, are carried over into group sex. But I still want to say that I love group sex and that it's given me a sexually supportive playground where I can experiment and expand and learn how to be myself and enjoy myself with other people. Sharing sexuality is a very loving thing.

[A] Goldstein: A good point, but group sex as a life style has to be a regression to the playground, like being with 18 kids throwing sand pies. To me, the world of sexuality is greater outside the playground. I would rather have the multiplicity of sex realized with one partner than have 19 surface experiences with 12 bodies in half an hour.

[Q] Playboy: Is a man who goes to bed with the same woman two or three times a night happier than the man who goes to bed with two or three women in one night?

[A] Pomeroy: It depends on the man. You didn't say what he does with the women once he gets them in bed.

[A] Money: It also depends on how young you are. Who wants two or three if one is better? Or one if four are better? In quantitative terms, there's no answer to a question like that.

[A] Van Den Haag: The trouble with having too many sexual partners in brief succession is that a point is reached where they all begin to seem alike.

[A] Simon: Right. The idea may be more pleasurable than the experience itself. Under some circumstances, three partners may only be three times the drag that one is. But they can also be spectacular. The numbers, by themselves, guarantee very little.

[A] E. Kronhausen: Once more, ours is quite the opposite perception. The sexual experiencing of another person always holds the most incredible surprises and often the unfolding of true mysteries to me. I find this as applicable to the group situation as to one-to-one encounters. Without that element of surprise, curiosity and wonder, sex—whether in a group or on an individual basis—would be a pretty dull affair to me.

[A] Rimmer: It's fairly typical of most swingers, though, to become bored or dissatisfied with the whole scene. I should mention two fascinating articles from my new book, Adventures in Loving, both written by women. With their husbands, they had been swingers for a couple of years, but they wanted more of a lasting relationship. When the two couples met each other, that was it. They are now involved in a group marriage.

[Q] Playboy: How common is group marriage as a contemporary life style?

[A] Pomeroy: We don't know exactly, but I can tell you with certainty that the number is very small. If you'll let me guess, we're talking about the low thousands.

[A] Rimmer: I'm in correspondence with at least a dozen middle-class people in their 30s who are involved in such relationships. They're very average people, solid Americans in many ways, trying to support families. Let me tell you about one foursome, two couples who contacted me after reading Proposition 31, which I presume was a reinforcing book for them. I guess they regard me as the avuncular figure on the subject. One of these couples has three children, the other two. One husband is an engineer, the other a salesman. They had no set pattern, but in any one week, one husband would sleep with the other wife a couple of times. One Sunday morning, the teenaged daughter of one couple asked the other husband, "Are you sleeping with my mother?" He replied, "You'd better ask your mother." Finally, these couples explained the situation to their children, and the two sets of youngsters subsequently worked out very well, merged in.

[A] But recently, one of the husbands was transferred from the East Coast to California. I wondered how they were going to continue their relationship. Do you know what they did? The wives switched households temporarily. One wife flew East for a month and the other flew West. In the middle of this switch, the California household was visited by friends of the wife—who couldn't believe what they saw. "Who's this woman living in your house?" they asked. I have a feeling that the biggest problem these four adults are having with their relationship is not with themselves and not with their children but with their peer group questioning it. They don't dare explain to their friends—average middle-class Americans—what they're doing, largely because of the sexual overtones. Mommy is sleeping with someone else, and Daddy is, too. That has to be pretty shocking to most Americans.

[A] Money: Naturally, most parents are uptight about their children's discovering that anything unconventional is going on. They always think they're hiding it from the kids, but of course they can't.

[A] Pomeroy: One of the things I'd say about group marriage is that it's tremendously complicated. To have a dyad is difficult enough. When you add a third and a fourth person, the complications are increased exponentially, not just arithmetically. The majority of them don't work, or they work for only a limited time—a year, two years, four years. They fall apart because of the tremendous complexities. It's said, and I believe it, that the sexual interaction is the least important confusion; they can usually handle that. It's the other interpersonal relationships—dominance, money, child care, for example—that aren't so simple to contend with.

[A] Simon: I would agree that most group marriages are doomed to be relatively short-lived, particularly among those for whom expanded sexual opportunities were the major attraction. At the same time, their participants seem to be making a statement about marriage as we know it currently. They may be saying that a two-person system is too limited to handle the emotional complexities and demands of contemporary social life; that marriage generates too much guilt and anger. Guilt when we fail to respond to our partner's needs at a particular moment or when we coerce our partner into responding in ways that he or she might not have wanted to; anger when our needs aren't met or when we are coerced into meeting needs we're not desirous of meeting. These people who are trying group marriage seem to be saying that they want a larger number of persons within the loving, intimate bond. That they fail isn't surprising; few of us were raised to be capable of this broader concept of intimacy. That people keep trying, however, I find very impressive.

[A] Perry: Bringing it into my own purview, let me say that jealousy is a significant factor in undermining gay group marriages. I've known of four group marriages that are no longer together. One of them was patterned after Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Five individuals decided they would live together in a loving relationship, and if any of them met someone new and wanted to bring him home, he could. It fell through when they began sharing sexually with one another. I've had group-marriage partners come to me and say they were getting tired of inviting a third or a fourth or a sixth party into their bedroom, because inevitably the newcomer got more attention than they did.

[A] Davis: I know a few gay women who are involved in what seems to be a group marriage, and it's taken them a long time to iron out their difficulties. Initially, their problem was one of jealousy, but it seems to be working for them now that they have their individual shit together.

[A] Van Den Haag: My theoretical view is that group marriage actually amounts to nothing more than some degree of promiscuity in a restricted group. I would predict that sooner or later, a group marriage will develop into fairly monogamous couples. Suppose there's a group of, say, six people. The chances are that each person will first have intercourse with the other five. But in time, I think a preference will develop for one person and they will tend to commit themselves—if not formally, at least emotionally—and are likely to have intercourse with each other almost exclusively. It's also possible that in some cases, a ménage à trois will develop, but I think these are likely to be fairly exceptional.

[A] Rimmer: Actually, the triad is the most popular form of group marriage in this country. And it works. In the past couple of years, I've had at least 50 letters from people involved in three-person relationships, those of one male and two females or two males and one female being about equally common. I would think that triads of long standing would eventually evolve into bisexual relationships, to some extent. The other group marriages I have known have tended to maintain separate dyads, separate couples. The exchange exists, but they don't interact sexually as a foursome.

[A] E. Kronhausen: We don't have any personal experience with group marriage. But it's to be expected that group marriage would minimize certain problems that are more acute and troublesome in traditional marriage, because it defuses them, so to speak. On the other hand, it seems only logical that group marriage could magnify certain other problems that may be more easily dealt with on a one-to-one basis.

[A] Rimmer: I would agree, in this sense: If you're in a group of four, and one male, for instance, strays into an outside affair, you're complicating the thing immeasurably. One wife in such a situation came to me recently, saying, "We were four healthy people, and then we all got venereal disease." It had to come out, finally, that one of the men—her husband, in fact—had dallied in an outside affair. That broke the group marriage apart. Blew it high; wide and handsome—probably even more than it would have in a monogamous relationship.

[A] Group marriage also opens up a number of other areas that traditional marriage doesn't. Four people, if the marriage includes two couples, simply can't react to one another in the same way as two. The male can never act in a true patriarchal sense, because his power is diluted. If he's trying to dominate his wife—like making demands on her or arguing with her—he's now doing it before an audience of two other people. That changes his whole behavior reaction. He must be less dominant, more careful in thrusting his ego demands. Another interesting learning experience, for a male, is adjusting to another male. The average male is brought up with a dominance syndrome, but he now has to relate, day by day, to another man and often defer to him. And, of course, jealousy as such has to be relearned in a whole new context. The only way a group relationship will work is if the original pair bonds are pretty strong. If there's one neurotic person in this arrangement, the four—or six—won't work.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any basic differences between group marriage and communal living?

[A] Rimmer: A commune would have more people involved. Group marriage, as I have projected it, would never exceed three couples. In some communes, 15 or 20 people live in the same house.

[A] Lovelace: Size is the main difference. But there are a couple of others. Married chicks are more likely to become jealous than the single chick in a commune. And in a commune, everyone works together; in most group marriages, everyone does their own thing.

[A] Rimmer: There was a commune called Harrad West out in San Francisco, started by eight people, where residents actually put up a duty roster specifying sleeping arrangements a month in advance. Eventually, it exploded because outsiders dropped in and, consequently, the sexual exchange became very muddy. When you get free sexuality in a commune, you're in trouble. You just can't structure it. Somebody has to get hurt.

[A] Money: That jibes with what little I know about communes. Love affairs inevitably destroy them.

[A] Perry: There are gay communes throughout America, but a typical one doesn't involve sexual sharing. Once the participants become lovers, they have a decided tendency to get an exclusive relationship going. Most of the gay communes are living arrangements where some of the members work to pay the bills while others take care of the home.

[A] Rimmer: What really seems to blow communes apart is the absence of a common stated goal among its members. There may be an economic interest that, if strong enough, will hold them together. But that's about the only goal that works.

[A] Dodson: I experimented with a minicommune last year. There were five of us and we were together four months. It was a very dynamic learning experience. But it's very difficult to live in groups, because we don't have enough emotional experience or preparation. You must confront a lot of problems and feelings that can be ignored alone or in a pair bond. It was great while we were together—and it was great to get apart.

[A] Pomeroy: There are all sorts of communes; some aren't sexual at all, being built around a work ethic or a product. Sometimes there is sex among married couples, but the commune is basically an economic unit, as Mr. Rimmer points out. But my opinion, and I guess it's not original, is that a sexual commune works only as long as you have a strong charismatic figure controlling it. As soon as he's gone, the thing falls apart. That happened in New Harmony, it happened in Oneida, it happens in modern communes.

[A] P. Kronhausen: I recently visited the People's Republic of China, where I spent several weeks as a member of the first delegation of American women to visit that country, and as I understand it, it's not any one leader, not even the mystique of Chairman Mao, that holds together the country and the communes we visited, but the belief in and dedication to a common goal.

[A] Simon: I would want to distinguish between communes that are created in order to serve some ideological purpose and those that represent more personalized attachments—a clan or extended family. The first kind clearly has more viability but tends to subject its members to demands for extreme conformity. The second kind is far less stable but represents a more interesting kind of experiment. Such communes depend upon a high level of economic, emotional and sexual affluence, such that no one need ever ask: "Am I getting as much as I'm giving?" As soon as that question gets asked, it's just about all over.

[A] I lived in that kind of situation for a short period, and while it lasted, it provided great happiness. I think that all of us who were involved were, for that period of time, better people than we normally were. And now that it's past, which is something that saddens me, I feel that I've been changed by that experience. I may be as self-protective as any of us, but at least I'm more aware now of how costly my self-protective devices really are. I don't believe in them the way I once did.

[A] Goldstein: Well, the sexual revolution can be won only in terms of changing our heads, and part of that is learning about those self-protective devices. One of mine has to do with bisexuality—which, by the way, is where I think the sex revolution will go: not in the direction of heterosexual group relationships but toward bisexuality. It's an area that frightens me tremendously, and yet we know that in the animal kingdom bisexuality is prevalent—because it's normal. I have a feeling that before long it will be fashionable among humans as well.

[A] Money: Living in the backwaters of Baltimore, I'm not well enough in on this thing to be able to say whether it's going to be fashionable or not. But I've picked up enough clues to know that something is happening on the bisexual front that wasn't happening five years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if the Seventies earned the sobriquet of the bisexual decade.

[A] Van Den Haag: If you define bisexuality as our being capable of having intercourse with and even attachments to members of either sex, that is true—but trivial. If you define it in terms of persons who are equally interested in sexual activity with either sex, I deny that there are such persons. Everyone I have ever known sooner or later has developed a preference for one sex or the other. I don't believe that anyone is just 50-50. The homosexual who is married and dutifully has intercourse with his wife, or even a few affairs, will tell you he's bisexual—but it's not true. He's either homosexual—and for various reasons, social and otherwise, engages in heterosexual activities—or he is a heterosexual who has strayed.

[A] Davis: People do have definite preferences. But those preferences can be reconditioned; I was conditioned to be heterosexual. I was never 50-50. Now my Lesbianism has solidified. There is a rightness in being where I am. With a woman, even when we're fighting, even when there's tension in the air, I just know I'm in the right place. With a man, even when things were nice and comfortable and everything was sweetness and light, something smelled funny. Sounds didn't come through right, things didn't taste right, my senses didn't click. I would never again experiment with a heterosexual relationship. I will never sleep with a man again as long as I live. Not since I've discovered the totality of relationships with women.

[A] Pomeroy: Most people aren't that resolute. We have found many males and females who think of sex as sex, and whether it comes from a male or a female is unimportant to them. Perhaps, Dr. van den Haag, you're getting your data from your private practice, and with all due respect, any clinician—I don't care how good he is—who makes generalizations from his private practice is in trouble. If I were to generalize about the homosexual patients I see in my practice, I'd say they're all neurotic—but why else would they come to me? I can't generalize from them to the total population. What we do know is that bisexuality was rampant even back in 1948, when we published the male volume of the Kinsey reports. We found that 46 percent of the males were neither purely homosexual nor purely heterosexual. Some ten percent of married males, we found, were having homosexual relations while heterosexually married. But people weren't anxious to let it be known. There was all sorts of covering up.

[A] Simon: I really must quarrel with your statistics, Wardell. Those original Kinsey data were subject to two kinds of error. The first—and more minor—was the possibility, since discovered, that Kinsey inadvertently oversampled the gay world. The second involves one of interpretation. The larger part of the group had their homosexual experiences—if they can be called that—during adolescence, usually in the company of other adolescents; shooting off to see how far it would go, that sort of thing. For very few was there any significant amount of homosexual behavior past adolescence.

[A] Pomeroy: Bill, go back and read the male volume again. You say, "For very few was there any significant amount of homosexual experience past adolescence." Does more than 20 percent sound like very few? As for your first statement—that we inadvertently oversampled the gay world—this is probably technically true, but we also got cover-up in this area, too. Besides, the errors were only minor ones.

[A] Rimmer: Well, whatever the case was in 1948, I notice an increase in the admission of bisexuality today. People who had bisexual feelings and never dared to be open about them are talking about it now. It's the same thing Kinsey did for the world with the publication of his reports. All of a sudden, he made fellatio and cunnilingus respectable. People thought: "If everyone else is doing it, it can't be the sickness I've been told it was ever since my childhood."

[A] Goldstein: When I was 17 and read Henry Miller on eating pussy, it gave me a tremendous purifying sense of not being alone. What Miller did for the Thirties, I'd like to see today's propagandists, today's sexologists and today's explorers do for bisexuality. I'd like them to say that whether we reach out for tits or balls, we're reaching out for another human being. I think bisexuality is much more sane than being a committed heterosexual or homosexual. But it's an area that's fraught with fears, especially for a guy, in terms of the whole concept of machismo. The thought of my sucking a cock is very frightening to me, and I haven't done it. Yet I think I'll be truly healthy when I've liberated myself enough to be active homosexually.

[A] Dodson: Bisexuality—relating to both sexes equally—is the fullest form of sexual expression. But self-sexuality is the basic and essential ingredient. You have to love yourself before you can be bisexual. Women are getting it together, because they aren't that terrified of each other's bodies, but, as Al indicated, men really have a problem. Heterosexual men are so afraid of each other, so afraid to have any kind of sensitivity or sexual feeling for each other, that it's really inhibiting. The division of sexuality into opposing camps keeps us repressed and apart. Bisexuality doesn't replace heterosex or homosex but, rather, expands both and brings us all together. I'm learning bisexuality after many years of heterosexual conditioning, and knowing I can love both women and men makes me feel a lot more secure.

[A] Simon: It seems to me that the capacity to engage in bisexual behavior demonstrates an ability to break out of sex-role stereotypes. To the degree that we break out of the John Wayne—or, for women, the Doris Day—mold, we should be able not only to relate sexually to persons of the same sex but to play more roles in bed, regardless of gender. Men don't always have to be aggressive and females receptive. The notions of masculinity and femininity that encapsulate us in so many aspects of our lives are really little more than cultural conventions. John Money's research on gender identity, possibly more than anyone else's, eloquently points in that direction.

[A] Money: Well, it's certainly true that we put an awful lot more pressure on boys to be masculine. Girls are allowed to dance together; they're allowed to sleep together at slumber parties; and if two girls are seen hugging each other in school, it's generally regarded as an expression of friendship, not of sex. They practically have to be sharing a dildo before anybody gets uptight about it. So there's more permissiveness about physical contact between growing and adolescent girls than there is between boys. But in reality, body contact between males—even up to the point of orgasm—has no particular dangers, either physical or psychological, provided it's part of the universally accepted cultural pattern and the people doing it aren't regarded as freaks.

[A] Van Den Haag: I was brought up in Italy, and my male friends and I would freely embrace; we would walk arm in arm sometimes and literally not dream of this as a homosexual gesture. But in this country, there's an almost phobic fear among males of touching each other, and excessive fear of one's own homosexual impulses. I think these men would probably discover what they felt for a male friend was simple affection, not homosexuality, but they are afraid. I think that's because the mother, in the typical American home, seems to be the dominant figure. That's not really true, but to the child it appears that way. The father, in his eyes, is just the fellow who takes out the garbage; so the son's male identification is rather precarious and must be defended more strongly.

[A] Perry: Sometimes in the gay community it's fashionable to say you're bisexual. Because then at least you're half normal, according to our society. But I don't believe in any way, shape or form that heterosexuals are more normal than I am. I have a feeling that most of bisexuality is due to curiosity, a desire to experiment.

[A] Lovelace: Whatever their reasons for doing it, people have been digging relationships with either sex since way back in time, all the way back in the Bible. A man and two women is the ideal sexual relationship as far as I'm concerned.

[Q] Playboy: Why is that?

[A] Lovelace: Because everything about it is groovy. A guy can be with one girl; he can be with the other girl; he can be with both girls. I mean, every man would like to be with two women—it's kind of double your pleasure, double your fun. And there's more for me to enjoy as a woman, too. A woman can satisfy a woman better than a man can. She knows how it feels to another woman, that's why. A man can be told, and he can try all his lifetime, but he doesn't know what it feels like. A woman shares more with you than a man does. Like Chuck and my friend Cherie and I, we've got a groovy relationship.

[Q] Playboy: Are there no dangers in bisexual experimentation?

[A] Davis: Of course there are. Bisexuality could fuck you up worse than heterosexuality. At least with heterosexuality, you can totally delude yourself into thinking everything's OK and that you're normal. With bisexuality, you're impairing your delusion, and you're certainly impairing your liberation. I can't see total liberation for a woman as anything but Lesbianism.

[A] Dodson: I see no dangers in bisexual experimentation. On the contrary, I feel there is far more danger in a rigid sexual posture. How are we going to change and grow without experimenting? And, Madeline, total liberation, for me, would include everyone. We need to let go of the labels and just be sexual.

[A] Money: What in this world is without dangers? For some people, not to experience bisexuality would be a danger. There are those who have hitherto thought themselves exclusively homosexual who will be able to discover a bisexual potential in themselves, and vice versa for heterosexuals. Some people will discover they have no bisexual potential. And for some it will be a danger even to experiment. Consent is the thing. There is no need either to deny bisexuality or to impose it on anyone.

[A] Pomeroy: I think Albert Ellis makes a valid point when he says that if, under any circumstances whatever, a heterosexual refused to have sex with a same-sexed person, or a homosexual with an opposite-sexed person, then he or she would be neurotic. However, extreme circumstances rarely exist for most of us. Bisexual experimentation can be dangerous for the fragile, the rigid, the unsure—and it can also be unfun for those who just don't dig their own sex.

[A] Perry: I once suggested to Steve, my other half, that he might like to experiment sexually with a woman, because I felt perhaps he was curious after hearing me talk about my heterosexual marriage. He was curious enough that we decided to attend a showing of an erotic film, Mona, in which a woman friend of ours was appearing. Steve's comment, after seeing the explicit heterosexual sex scenes, was, "That's just not for me." That was the end of that. I personally don't feel that people should be pushed into any type of sexual act that they feel is unnatural to them. On the other hand, I know a guy who ended up at a swingers' party in bed with another man while his wife had sex with another woman. That was about three years ago. Since then, they have experimented further with bisexuality, they tell me, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them.

[A] Simon: It's amazing how much all lovemaking—straight and gay—really looks and feels alike. Most of the claims of something special about straight and gay activity come from each group's trying to defend its phobic reaction to the other. But for many people—both straight and gay—that phobic response is sufficiently strong that any attempt at bisexuality produces only bad sex and bad heads. If I fear heights, for example, and as a result can't ride in elevators or airplanes, I ought to do something about it. But that doesn't mean I have to take up mountain climbing.

[A] P. Kronhausen: Any situation you expose yourself to that has the potential of bringing out overpowering feelings of anxiety or panic presents the same sort of danger you're talking about. It has nothing to do with sex as such.

[A] Van Den Haag: The dangers of bisexuality are comparable to those of LSD. For some people it's harmless, as far as we know. In others it has precipitated a breakdown requiring institutionalization, temporary or permanent. So bisexual experimentation may precipitate panic or a breakdown, but I think it's likely to leave most people indifferent or, at worst, disgusted.

[Q] Playboy: If bisexuality is on the rise, as most of you seem to be saying, how about overt homosexuality? Has there been any appreciable change in the gay population in the United States in the past 10 or 20 years?

[A] Perry: Every time I speak on a campus, I find individuals getting up and saying, "Well, there are more homosexuals in America than ever before," and I always say, "Well, I certainly disagree with that." I think what's happening is that today we're talking about it more. The figure may be increasing a little because the population is increasing. The statistics from anthropologists, from the Kinsey report, are that the gay population fluctuates somewhere between four and ten percent in any given society. In America, probably close to six percent of the population is homosexual. In Los Angeles County alone, we estimate some 300,000 individuals.

[A] Davis: There are not only more Lesbians coming out; in sheer numbers, there are really more Lesbians. Maybe the women's movement has created this situation. Through commitment to women's causes, probably a number of women have realized that commitment must be total.

[A] Lovelace: Whatever the numbers are, I think they may be going up. People are more open about homosexuality, more proud of it now. And, as people are finding out that their closest friends are into it, they're trying it themselves. I imagine this might cause a gradual increase.

[Q] Playboy: When did you realize that you were a homosexual, Mr. Perry?

[A] Perry: I believe I've always been gay. At the early age of five, when I used to go to the movies in Tallahassee, Tarzan turned me on. I used to fantasize, wishing he'd throw me around the way he did those natives. At the age of nine, I had my first homosexual experience—my first sexual experience for that matter—with a boy in our neighborhood who was 13. Though people tell me I was picked up by a dirty young man, I was actually the aggressor in that situation. But since our society said you were to date young women, you were to marry, you were to have children, I got heterosexually married just before my 19th birthday.

[A] At the time, I was pastoring a fundamentalist Pentecostal church that discouraged any kind of sex activities outside marriage. As a teenager, I had had some problems when a group of us had been caught masturbating at our church camp. Actually, we had mutually masturbated. The very idea that you would touch another male's penis was too much for this group of conservative Christians. So when I decided to get married, I discussed that episode and my feelings for other males with the minister who was going to perform the ceremony. He told me marriage would cure everything, get rid of all those feelings. My fiancée's attitude, too, was that the marriage would take care of everything. But it didn't. I could have intercourse with my wife, but five minutes later I would feel something was lacking.

[A] Davis: I had a similar experience in my own heterosexual marriage. I was a victim of the same kind of programing all women are subjected to in our society: to get married within a particular age range, have babies, settle down, be a good mother. Being Jewish, I was under pressure not only to get married but to marry a nice Jewish boy. But I didn't; I married a nice Episcopal boy. I liked him very much; I thought I loved him. I think one of the reasons I didn't marry a nice Jewish boy was because of the safety valve. I knew if I married somebody who wasn't Jewish, I could get out of it more easily and with less parental disapproval. And I did, after a year and a half. It wasn't hideous, it was just incomplete. I couldn't understand why nothing was happening. I thought all the things that women think—I must be frigid, orgasms aren't happening, there must be something wrong with me.

[A] Perry: Me, too. During the first six months of my marriage, I had one experience with another male—and felt completely satisfied. Then there was a three-and-a-half-year period in which nothing happened; I kept fighting with myself, saying, "No, no, you're not a faggot, you're not a gutter creature. But Troy, what in God is it eating at you?" Finally, after we'd moved to California, I walked into a bookstore and saw some physique magazines for the first time in my life. When I started looking through them, I was excited by what I saw. I finally got up enough nerve to ask the woman behind the counter if she had any books on homosexuality. Years later, friends told me that I had happened into the only place in Orange County that stocked any type of gay books. I bought a copy of everything she had. Most of them were novels, and they turned me on, but they didn't tell me anything until I found The Homosexual in America, by Donald Webster Cory. When I read that little paperback, I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was a homosexual.

[A] I went to my district elder and told him about myself. He just became unglued and exclaimed, "My God, have you molested some little boy in Sunday school?" That was his stereotype of the homosexual: the child molester. He told me to pray and forget all that nonsense. But when I was 23, I separated from my wife. She moved back to where her parents lived. They are ministers and they felt that homosexuality was a form of demon possession—that all ties should be severed forever. When she finally got a divorce, she made it plain that she wouldn't let me see our two children again. But I will; I want to see them.

[A] Davis: Even when I thought I was straight, I never wanted children. But the period right after my marriage was a hard one for me, too. Previously, I had experienced all kinds of relationships—roughly 100 with men, as well as some with women. I considered myself an experimenter. Probably because I was programed for relationships with men, I became involved with a couple of gay men after the divorce. Then I met a woman, and she followed me around for a long time. I was too frightened to take the step. I just had a strange feeling something very important was happening. She was very kind and spent a lot of time allaying my fears—and, after a while, I fell in love with her. We stayed together for five years. It was during that period that I realized my relationships with women were not experimental, they were serious. I felt as if I were no longer on alien soil—as if I were at home.

[Q] Playboy: When you came out, what kind of reaction did you get from your family and friends?

[A] Davis: I've always had a very honest relationship with my family, and they took it very casually. My friends were part of the counterculture, and their reaction was, "Anything you do is cool." The men I knew thought it was a phase, that I'd get over it. Certainly, I'd go back to men eventually, because weren't men superior? But I didn't, because they weren't. I don't really hate individual men; I just think that men should go someplace else and do their thing, preferably together, and leave us women alone for a while. But nobody gave me too much trouble about coming out. I've been more privileged than most gay people; I probably hassled myself more than anyone else did.

[Q] Playboy: In past years, homosexuals have been subjected to a great deal of harassment by the police. Do you see any lessening of that type of persecution?

[A] Perry: There are areas in which strides have been made, where we're not harassed. In San Francisco, for instance, the chief of police finally decided it was a ridiculous waste of manpower to assign men to hassle the clientele in gay bars. In Los Angeles, we're still harassed by a chief of police who claims he's going to enforce "all the laws." But in doing so, he only enforces certain laws against homosexuals. They charge us, for example, with "lascivious conduct"—the cover-all for anything gay people do in a gay bar. If I put my hand on your shoulder, I can be arrested for it. They send policemen into gay bars dressed as homosexuals to entrap you—get you to buy them a drink so that they can testify in court that you tried to pick them up for illicit purposes. But if a guy picks up a "broad" in a bar, his behavior is admired: He's a real stud.

[A] Davis: The interesting thing is that people don't get prosecuted for fucking; they get prosecuted for talking about it. That's oppression. People aren't usually followed into their bedrooms and arrested for an act; they're arrested on street corners for things like soliciting or loitering for the purpose of whatever. I know of several situations where undercover couples—posing as swingers—have entrapped and arrested patrons of gay bars. But things are improving. On a radio show in Buffalo a few months ago, the captain of the vice squad was a guest, taking phone calls. I got through and asked him, "If you want to get gay people off the street, where can they go?" And he virtually did an ad for the Mattachine Society. That kind of thing would never have happened three years ago. We've made so much noise—by getting out on the streets, wearing buttons, picketing—that they have really had to let up on us. We've learned we have to make noise—to let everybody know that we're around, and that we're not going to take shit anymore.

[A] Goldstein: Well, in New York City, the homosexual has greater rights than the heterosexual. It amazes me. We publish Gay—the largest homosexual publication in the world—in addition to Screw, and it's never been touched legally, never been harassed. It has second-class mailing privileges. Screw, on the other hand, has been arrested 120 times and had all its second-class mailing privileges denied. We're in the Federal courts in Washington on that one. If I want to eat a girl in New York, I may get harassed, but if I'm gay and I want to get fucked in the ass, there won't be a prosecution unless I do it in front of the United Nations. One reason I might like to become bisexual is so I can get some of the political wallop of homosexuals. Homosexuality can deliver several million votes.

[A] Van Den Haag: Homosexuals aren't that potent a political force. If they think they are, they're deceiving themselves. They have simply become very visible, very truculent, highly politicized.

[A] Davis: You're probably right; we're not as potent a political force as we would like to think we are. But we're working on it. The major reason I went to the Democratic National Convention to plead for the gay plank was not to change laws. I never really expected adoption of that plank, which advocated not only the repeal of sodomy laws in all states but also ensured jobs, housing and public accommodations for gay people. I made that speech because I knew there were gay people out there at four o'clock in the morning, sitting in front of their television sets, waiting to see one of their own people stand up and say, "I'm here, you're out there, and I love you, and I want you to know that there are people who are working their asses off for you and for us. You don't have to be as afraid as you have been."

[A] Simon: In assuming that all or most gays are really alike—even politically—aren't we making a mistake that the straight world too often makes with reference to the gay world? Unless you operate with a sexual metaphysic organizing your entire view of the world, other issues begin to carve up that potential bloc. One forgets about all the gays who are pro-establishment, extremely conservative, hawks, racists—even sexists.

[A] Perry: What you say is true, of course, but as far as politics is concerned, the homosexual community is, in effect, a bloc. And we can deliver the vote, too; four years ago, we elected a councilman in the Hollywood district, which is really Los Angeles' gay ghetto—if we have one. Suddenly, the politicians have realized that gay people vote, too; they all want to talk to us. We're making progress. But the Lesbians haven't formed a significant bloc the way male homosexuals have.

[A] Dodson: That's true. Gay men, for a long time, have been fighting the whole sexual revolution singlehandedly. They've been leading the way and doing a lot of frontline action to establish homosexuality as a valid life style. Sexual liberation, gay liberation and women's liberation are all hooked up for me. It's ridiculous to say heterosexual marital sex is the only proper and legal sex.

[A] Pomeroy: You're right, of course. But our prohibitions about homosexuality—particularly male homosexuality—go back 2500 years or more. They're deeply embedded in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

[A] Van Den Haag: Yes, and because of that, I find it very hard to understand, Mr. Perry, how you can reconcile your religious beliefs as a Christian minister with your justification of homosexuality, which is opposed by Christian Scriptures.

[A] Perry: Why shouldn't God care about homosexuals? It's very easy to reconcile my Christianity with my homosexuality. Can we actually believe that Christ—who recognized the human need for mortal love and its physical fulfillment, as well as his divine love—can ask that legions of homosexuals either live a life of celibacy or face a life of damnation? Not the Christ I know! It was just this kind of attitude that made me start our church. One day I prayed: "Heavenly Father, if you want to see a church start as an outreach in our community, just let me know when." And that still small voice in the mind said, "Now." Four years ago, I took an ad in the Los Angeles gay newspaper, The Advocate, announcing my new ministry. We've now got around 15,000 members, including a synagogue consisting of 60 gay Jews.

[Q] Playboy: What is the life style of a homosexual couple today? The traditional concept is that its partners, like those in heterosexual marriage, take masculine and feminine roles.

[A] Rimmer: The homosexual couples I've known tend to act out the monogamous relationship. They're very straight in that respect. I have a very good homosexual friend in Boston who, as the man in his relationship, provides the income. The other guy, who is the woman, does all the cooking and housekeeping. He's not especially effeminate in appearance, but he takes that female role. I don't know enough about homosexual relationships, though, to say whether there is new liberation in that type of situation.

[A] Pomeroy: The dominant/passive male partnership, or the butch/femme female pairing, was always something of a false stereotype. In our studies, we estimated that only five percent of Lesbians were butch—obviously homosexual; and about 15 percent of the males were obviously effeminate.

[A] Davis: Why isn't it possible for a strong woman simply to be a strong woman? Why does she have to be a butch? In my present relationship, neither one of us is really the butch or the femme. So my lover wears her hair shorter than mine; what does that mean? When we fight, I scream just as loud as she does. We both depend on each other; we both take care of each other. I suppose some of the old butch/femme relationships still exist, but their impact is diminishing. Women's liberation has done a tremendous amount to strengthen women's self-image, to make us realize that it's OK to be strong as well as to be weak.

[A] Perry: Yes, things are radically changing, even in the gay community. Words like butch and femme are going by the wayside. And Lesbian organizations talk more and more about the decline of the stereotype of the dinosaur dyke.

[Q] Playboy: How do homosexual men relate to homosexual women? Is there cooperation between gay men and Lesbians?

[A] Davis: Gay women generally feel ambivalent about gay men. There's a tremendous split in the movement, because gay men are still men and gay women are still women. Therefore, gay men are oppressive to gay women. For years we've been doing the shit work—serving the coffee, organizing, typing. At this point in the development of the movement, it's important for Lesbians to be together. Women have been so alienated from one another for so long: vying for men, jealously scratching out their place in the world—which was only in the shadow of some man anyway. Lesbians are breaking through that alienation and are learning to love each other and love themselves as strong individuals. That's the importance of separatism.

[A] Perry: I don't see it that way. In organizations like our church, we have both gay men and gay women getting it together, saying, "All gay people are good." And we're working together to fight discrimination. Recently, a woman was fired from a job in a large Los Angeles hospital because she was a Lesbian. She made the mistake of going to a new employee, introducing herself as president of a Lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, and saying: "We're a group of women working for women's rights. If you're gay, the organization's for you, and even if you're not, we'd like for you to get involved with us." The new employee became hysterical, rushed to the personnel department to report the incident and the Lesbian was fired. Then she came to the crisis center at our church. When I heard the story, I took the woman and her lover to the hospital's union steward and suggested that she be rehired. "We wouldn't want to bring 500 homosexuals down around the emergency ward, with all those pregnant mothers trying to get in to have their babies, would we?" I said. Three days later, she was rehired. We didn't even have to sue.

[A] Davis: I suppose it's important that gay women and gay men should present a united front to straight people. But I'm sort of a moderate separatist. I prefer working with women. As a matter of fact, that position made me nervous about participating in a panel appearing in a magazine like Playboy. I know most of your readership is male, and much of what I think the magazine stands for—or seems to—is still very sexist. But I also realize that there are women who read Playboy, even if they pick it up at their doctor's office. And these are the women I want to talk to. I'll use any vehicle I can. I know this article won't reach organized Lesbians, but it may reach some women—even one who might look at herself more clearly because of it.

[A] E. Kronhausen: I am really appalled by your sex hostility, Miss Davis. The kind of "equal but separate" philosophy you're advocating smacks to me far too much of the same argument white racists are using to keep blacks and whites separated. Unfortunately, some of the black-power people are using the same argument to keep black society separate from white society. But black racism is no better to my mind than white racism, just as female chauvinism isn't any better than male chauvinism. Perhaps it's more understandable and excusable, because both blacks and women have for so long been subject to prejudice and oppression. Still, what we need is not more apartheid between the sexes or the races but more togetherness, more understanding, more cooperation and, if I may use that much-abused word in this context, more love.

[A] Davis: I certainly agree with the ideals you set forth. But we can achieve togetherness, understanding, cooperation and so forth only if we have equal power. Women aren't starting with the same power base as men. Until we have that power base, which I believe can be achieved only through separatism, we aren't going to be able to reach those goals. I'm not interested in making you or any other man comfortable with my philosophy. As a matter of fact, a little bit of discomfort might help you to analyze the situation more clearly.

[Q] Playboy: We've heard that male homosexuals are afraid to grant Lesbians equal power in the gay movement. Is that true?

[A] Perry: That's absurd. Most male homosexuals don't look at a gay woman as a threat. They don't even fear straight women. As a gay, you're more liberated with the opposite sex. You don't look at a woman as a sex object, and she knows it. I've yet to meet a woman who wouldn't sit down with a gay man and talk about her most intimate sex feelings, such as her reactions to other individuals—because you have removed that block, that fear that you're not sincere, that you're only trying to get her into the bedroom.

[Q] Playboy: There is an element in the male homosexual community that has nothing to do with women even as friends: the so-called rough trade, which seems to be bound together by a kind of sadomasochistic machismo. Is that kind of behavior on the increase, Mr. Perry?

[A] Perry: I don't think so. Only a small percentage of the gay community has ever been into sadomasochistic role playing, with one the master and the other the slave. I don't knock rough trade, but I don't particularly want to try it. I'm a lover, not a fighter. Do you hear me, Muhammad Ali?

[A] Simon: Most biker types hang around saloons called leather bars, but my feeling about these places—and you can find them in virtually every large city—is that only a small part of their clientele is into S and M in any real sense. For most customers, the attraction is the exaggerated sense of masculinity that one finds there, a kind of "butchier than thou" atmosphere. And most of this I would interpret as a reasonable reaction to a world that refuses to see the essentially masculine characteristics of most male gays.

[A] Perry: For years, I was so paranoid that I thought everybody who went to leather bars carried whips. I was afraid to walk into those places; thought I'd be handcuffed and roped before I could move around. But recently, the president of a bike club who had become part of our church took me around to a number of leather bars. And it was cool. Of course, some of the people who hang out there are looking for others who enjoy S and M. I've learned that they have signals, at least on the West Coast. If they're an S, they wear keys on the left-hand side of their belts. If they're an M—or want a slave relationship—they wear keys on the right-hand side. That's not my thing, but I like the bars; if it appeals to them, that's fine.

[A] Davis: All I can say about S and M is that if my lover came to me and suggested using a whip, I'd listen to what she had to say, and then say, "Go find somebody else to whip. Have a good time. But come near me with that fucking thing and I'll break your arm."

[A] P. Kronhausen: Homosexuals, of course, haven't got any monopoly on sadomasochism. I remember once in France, in a group-sex scene, I was actually having a very good time in bed. All of a sudden, I felt a lighted cigarette on my leg. I didn't even know this guy was coming up behind me. He happened to be a member of the French Assembly and he was getting his kicks out of hearing people scream. I was livid. I really told him off.

[A] Goldstein: But you know, that kind of thing really turns some people on. If sexual life styles could be merchandised the way stocks are, I'd say S and M is a growth stock. I can see IBM and I.T. & T. moving into S and M. How's that for a bowl of alphabet soup? Anyhow, there's no doubt that S and M seems to be an increasingly popular area.

[A] Pomeroy: Where are your data? I don't know of any such data, and I don't think you do, either. About all we know is that in the Forties, S and M literature sold more than any other kind in the under-the-counter bookstores.

[A] Goldstein: Well, it's over the counter now. I can only go by the classified and display advertisements that come across my desk to be published in Screw. That's a pretty good barometer. For example, there are more advertisements placed by masseuses offering S and M—often described as "English culture"—than for any other sexual activity. In the five years since Screw started, the growth of S and M has been phenomenal.

[A] Van Den Haag: I think we can say that such behavior—or at least its symbolism—is somewhat more visible. But that may merely indicate that we are more tolerant toward the euphemisms for debasement.

[A] E. Kronhausen: Sadism and masochism can be traced to militarism during the past three decades: World War Two, Korea, Vietnam. S and M has long been popular in England—hence the phrase English culture—especially in the militaristic, sexually segregated system of the so-called public schools. A lot of sadomasochism—like spanking and caning—is built right into the educational system.

[A] Money: That's true, but I disagree with Al that sadomasochism's more prevalent now; it's just more talked about. It's always been with us. We're basically a violent people. That comes out in the way people beat up their wives and husbands and children. This phenomenon isn't always accompanied by sexual arousal, but those who can really cut loose in that destructively hurtful way, with those who are emotionally closest to them, are usually not very far away from being able to get an orgasm out of it.

[A] P. Kronhausen: We've talked to many military men who said that they practically did have orgasms while bombing enemy territory. And that they'd rather do that than have a woman.

[A] Goldstein: When I was writing an article on Monique Van Cleef, the famous sadist who was thrown out of New Jersey and now operates in The Hague, I went through a George Plimpton number. She put me in a pillory and spanked me. Despite my initial curiosity, I found out that I didn't like it. I didn't get a hard-on. I was very relieved.

[A] Dodson: The cliché image of sadomasochism is one of chains, whips, leather, beatings and brutality. But that isn't what it's really all about. S and M is how we treat one another in everyday life. The S and M in an average marriage is overwhelming. Sexually, the man is usually the sadist and the woman the masochist. For instance, a man is dutifully doing foreplay for his wife: He's got the wrong stroke, he's doing it too hard, his finger is dry and it's really uncomfortable. But she can't say anything, because it'll hurt his feelings; he'll think he's not a good lover, and she must always protect his ego. If she does say something, he'll lose his erection. Usually, she suffers silently, but the next day, perhaps, she'll have her revenge by accidentally throwing out a pile of important papers, and the S and M is reversed. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a perfect example of everyday S and M.

[A] E. Kronhausen: In the largest sense, that's true, of course, Betty, and it's antihuman. But if we confine ourselves to physical manifestations of sadomasochism, I wouldn't criticize anyone for engaging in it if he did it within such limits that nobody got hurt seriously and both partners agreed to it in advance. But often things can easily get out of hand. What turns us off is that, as psychologists, we realize what's behind this kind of behavior: the inability to enjoy, indulge and develop one's own healthy capacity for sensuality, which is almost limitless.

[A] Pomeroy: I don't see sadomasochism that way. A great deal of it is very loving behavior, in the specifically sexual sense that adherents enjoy inflicting or receiving pain in a sexual situation. I've known many sadomasochists whose behavior shows itself as very tender, loving and giving. I'm excluding extreme acts of violence, of course. But in the ordinary situation, it's the victim—the masochist—who is controlling the action. He's determining how much pain is inflicted upon himself. Some years back at the Kinsey Institute, we were filming for our archives two homosexual males—a sadomasochistic couple. The sadist had manacled the masochist and tied him up; he'd burned his nipples with a lighted cigarette. The masochist was writhing around in pain. Then the sadist took a lighted candle and let the hot wax drop onto his partner's penis and testes, sending him into paroxysms of anguish. But all the time, the sadist was carefully watching the face of the masochist. When he saw that it was just too much to bear, he would raise the candle up and give the wax a chance to cool. It suddenly dawned on me that the masochist was almost literally controlling the sadist's hand. When they were finished, I asked who was in charge. Both answered that, of course, the masochist was. They had it straight.

[A] Van Den Haag: This is much too simple—as is most of the Kinsey stuff. The true sadist isn't terribly interested in torturing a masochist. He's interested in torturing someone who hates it, who actually suffers.

[A] Simon: True, but very few people have extreme commitments to S and M with physical violence and torture. In most cases, we're dealing not with outrageous acts of violence but with relatively mild, theatrical charades organized around the themes of dominance and submission. And in that respect, the behavior resembles much that we might find, in rather diluted form, in very conventional sexual relationships. There are probably aspects of sadism, masochism or both in the sexual activity we all engage in.

[A] Goldstein: The psychological aspects of S and M fascinate me. When I was doing the story on Monique Van Cleef, I noticed that the people she treated were inevitably the most successful, the most influential, the most important members of society. And I wondered whether these powerful people felt such a weight of guilt that they, in turn, wanted to be abused. I had the image of an Ingmar Bergman film, with a line of people wending their way up some steep incline, and each person whipping the person in front of him. Sort of a La Ronde of mutual exploitation. The people wielding authority had to pay a Monique to beat them up. I try to empathize with sexual experiences, but I can't understand S and M. If some woman walked on my chest with high-heeled shoes, would I enjoy it? No way. Besides, it would leave pockmarks.

[A] Religion is another factor. One day while I was visiting Monique, the person in the pillory was an elderly Catholic priest. He had never been touched by a woman, yet he had fought all his life against his yearning to masturbate and his desire for a woman. At the age of 62, he came to Monique's house, and she jerked him off while whipping him. He let me take photos of this event, as long as I didn't show his face. Well, it was frightening. I didn't know which was the greater injustice: this man's belief in Catholicism or the crack of the whip on his skin. In fact, in the midst of orgasm, he screamed, "Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus Christ! I'm coming! I'm coming!" in Dutch. It was translated for me. I still get goose bumps thinking about it. I guess those who are into whipping, humiliating bondage and that sort of thing are probably the true Catholics, because they accompany their sexuality with so much pain.

(continued on page 192)Playboy Panel(continued from page 98)

[A] Pomeroy: I can't buy that. There are other, more valid reasons for sadomasochism and bondage. One—and it's a thing that people don't quite understand—is that when a person becomes aroused sexually, all of his or her sensory thresholds go up. The individual can't hear, smell or feel as well. So something that's painful in a non-erotic state can be mildly titillating when you're aroused. You're in a different physiological state.

[A] Dodson: A playful example of S and M is to tickle people until they become hysterical and give up. You reach a peak, and then you just let go and it all stops and a peaceful calm comes over you. Did you ever do that when you were a kid? Get tickled until you laughed yourself silly?

[A] Lovelace: Yes. I can remember when someone, even several people, have held me down and tickled me. And I still think of freaky things to do—and to be done to me. I get turned on by watching vampire movies where they have torture chambers. The idea of being humiliated doesn't turn me on, but having things happen to me while I'm tied down is my major fantasy. It's a whole trip, like a situation where you come so many times that you become supersensitive and try to move and jerk yourself away. If you're tied down, you can't. It's really fantastic. That's probably my only unfulfilled fantasy.

[A] Van Den Haag: That desire presupposes a great deal of guilt feeling. Apparently, you want to be punished.

[A] Lovelace: No, I don't; I don't have any guilt feelings, either.

[A] Pomeroy: Very commonly, particularly in the female, a desire for bondage supposes that she's looking for a way out of responsibility. If she's tied down, she can't help herself. Women's fantasies of being raped are essentially the same thing. I would guess that rape, bondage and forced degradation would constitute around 10 or 15 percent of all female fantasies.

[A] E. Kronhausen: If I may come to Linda's rescue here: As much as we are basically against S and M and bondage, for ideological and mental-health reasons, the kind of fantasy Linda is talking about doesn't necessarily presuppose guilt or a renunciation of responsibility for one's acts. It doesn't even qualify as genuine sadomasochism, at least not in the generally accepted, clinical sense of the term. I think one has to be very careful in interpreting such fantasies, or even behavior, without knowing more about the psychology of the person involved.

[Q] Playboy: What's the most common female sexual fantasy?

[A] Pomeroy: Straight intercourse, male above, female below. But many females don't fantasize at all.

[A] Dodson: I think it's superimportant for women to fantasize more. Learning to fantasize expands your imagination, which, in turn, develops your capacity to be creative. A lot of my old fantasies have been lived out and my new fantasies are a lot more interesting. One of my favorite sexual fantasies is the making of a porno movie. I imagine that I am the camera, the crew and the star in every scene. I was once actually in an orgy that was filmed and it was a fantastic sexual turn-on. If I continue to have orgasms with my porno-movie fantasy, I'm sure I'll end up actually doing it someday.

[A] Simon: While most women may not have explicitly sexual fantasies, females who aren't aroused watching a porno flick can be aroused watching Elizabeth Taylor making eyes at Richard Burton across a 40-foot screen, even when, having read the novel, they know they won't even touch each other for another 27 minutes. Romantic love can be the pornography of females. And both types of fantasies may misserve their creators. Men fantasize sexual acts they will never realize; women train themselves for romantic expectations they will rarely experience.

[A] P. Kronhausen: I have lots of sexual fantasies that remain unfulfilled. But I'm going to save them for my autobiography.

[A] Davis: I fantasize, but I don't want to talk about it—or write about it, either. A lot of women don't want to reveal their fantasies, maybe because they're afraid they'll go away. I also would never be that explicit, knowing that men will read this. It's none of their business.

[A] Perry: I've already written my autobiography, so there's no use holding out on all of you. My unfulfilled fantasy is making it with Burt Reynolds.

[A] Goldstein: You and Helen Gurley Brown. The fantasies I run across are quite a bit farther out than that. Isn't it amazing how fashions of what's considered far out have changed? When I was 19 or 20, the forbidden fruit was eating pussy. All the guys wanted to, but they wouldn't admit it—because that meant there was something wrong with you. You'd let a woman suck your cock, but to eat pussy was on some level unmasculine. Today that's commonplace, but we see ads in Screw not only for S and M, as I mentioned, but for "water sports." Men who want to be pissed upon or shit upon. I see this as a step away from the sexual usages of the body and an emphasis on the juice-clearing functions of those parts that have both sexual and excretory capabilities. I'm sure a Freudian would have great fun with the psychological dynamics of all that.

[A] Pomeroy: Anal intercourse, of course, has been practiced throughout history. It occurs in about ten percent of marriages.

[A] Goldstein: Do you have a statistic for everything?

[A] Perry: Many people don't realize that in the state of California, even husbands and wives can go to prison for up to 15 years for performing oral sex. If you fall off the bed in the middle of intercourse, before you hit the floor you've broken 50 state laws. This applies not just to gay people but to heterosexuals—although it's usually enforced only against homosexuals.

[A] Money: In Massachusetts, unless they've changed the law, intercourse must be performed with the man above the woman, their bodies covered by a sheet and the blinds drawn.

[A] Pomeroy: I don't know what your experience has been, but in our research, we've found an interesting social difference among homosexuals. There's more anal intercourse on lower social levels and more fellatio on upper social levels. In heterosexual anal intercourse, I don't believe that distinction exists. It's practiced by people who are experimenting all the way around.

[A] Goldstein: I certainly don't see anal intercourse increasing. In fact, we scheduled a symposium on ass fucking and we almost had to call it off, because nobody was into that, so to speak.

[A] Dodson: Liberating the asshole is next on the list. Lately, some of us women have been encouraging straight men to experience penetration. We gently insert a finger. If he learns how to relax his sphincter muscle, he can then graduate to the penis-shaped vibrator. Most men are very fearful for their assholes, and it's instructive as well as liberating for them to learn to be penetrated. The first time I really enjoyed anal intercourse was with a bisexual man who had been penetrated and he really knew how to do it. I think a lot of heterosexual men have hurt women with ass fucking, and that's why they are so afraid of it themselves. But if you know how to do it properly, and you know how to take care of your body, it can be a very erotic experience.

[A] Lovelace: I think it's great, too. As a matter of fact, if I were choosing which was the most fantastic orgasm—clitoral, vaginal or anal—I'd say anal is the biggest. And it's not at all uncomfortable, as most people psych themselves out to believe.

[A] Pomeroy: People who have had limited amounts of anal intercourse commonly find it painful, because they haven't learned how to relax their sphincter muscles. When they become accustomed to it, they find anal intercourse stimulating—because the area around the anus is very sensitive.

[A] Lovelace: Sure. I let my mind control my body—as anybody who saw Deep Throat can tell you. For that I had to learn how to avoid gagging when a penis went down my throat. It's a matter of relaxation. Right now I could sit here and make my ass or my vagina so tight you couldn't put a finger in it. Or I can sit here and totally relax my muscles so there's no problem with anything—even a hand—going in. My anal opening doesn't expand as much as my vagina, though. The first inch of your ass is really the hard part. Once it penetrates beyond that, it's a whole heat trip. My whole body just starts bubbling—it's like a hot rush starting at my feet and running on up through my body to my head.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any limits to permissible—or desirable—sexual behavior?

[A] Van Den Haag: I am opposed to public display of sexual acts for their own sake—though not necessarily to the acts displayed. Sexual acts strike me as private, involving private parts and relationships. In private, what you do with a consenting person is your own affair. I think whether or not what you do is good in terms of your own welfare should not be determined by law. But exhibition, by definition, exceeds the private sphere.

[A] Pomeroy: I think there are two limits to permissible behavior. One is hurting someone else—imposing sex on somebody who doesn't want it. The other is adults' having sex with young children; and by young, I'm thinking primarily of preadolescent kids. Even though the child initiates it, wants it himself, I really question whether young children are capable of making these decisions.

[A] Van Den Haag: I'd agree with that, basically. The only reason I might be opposed to bestiality, to mention another form of behavior, is that I'm not sure about the consent of the animal.

[A] Davis: Exactly. How can you have a consenting sheep? I knew a guy who fucked a chicken. But what choice does a chicken have? I don't understand bestiality at all. How could you be excited or fulfilled by something that doesn't make the choice to be with you?

[A] Money: Well, a dog, for example, can very definitely choose to be with you. Dogs are turned on by human sexual scents. Some of them, especially neurotic dogs that have been apartment raised and have never led a normal dog's outdoor life, make themselves a goddamned nuisance. But don't forget the poor lonely, totally isolated lady whose only friend in life is her dog or her cat, and don't cast the first stone at her because she goes to bed at night with that animal sleeping between her legs. It might be the only comfort she ever had. Same for an old man who has lost his wife—to say nothing of someone whose brain cells are beginning to fade out. There's a lot of comfort in a pet.

[A] E. Kronhausen: A couple of years ago, we made a film in Denmark about people in the live-sex-show business. We did a long interview with Bodil, a farm girl who became famous, or notorious, for her appearances in porno magazines and films with various animals. She told us she wouldn't dream of doing any of these things for her own personal turn-on. She did it only for the porno trade, as a living. But as a child, she did have her first orgasm with a dog licking her, and to this day she really does get turned on by playing around with her stallion. I can't say more about it now, because our next book, Sex for Fun and Profit, deals with all this in some detail. This girl didn't mind doing the porno things with all these unlikely animals, like hogs and bulls, but—and this may shock you, Miss Davis—she'd rather not do shows with another woman. That's how idiosyncratic our sexual likes and dislikes may be. It also shows how tolerant and nonjudgmental we must be in the whole area of human sexuality.

[A] Dodson: Listen, making it with a dog has been one of my favorite masturbatory fantasies for years. I never had a preference for breed, but it was always a big furry dog. When I was little, I used to sleep with a big Teddy bear. But to some people, the whole idea of fucking with animals, or fucking in front of animals—or letting children watch you—just incites fear and anger.

[A] Lovelace: I've never turned around and walked away from anything related to sex. I have absolutely no taboos.

[Q] Playboy: How about necrophilia?

[A] Lovelace: That doesn't turn me on. But if somebody else enjoys it, I'm not going to condemn him for it. Maybe five years from now, though, I'll dig it. Who knows?

[Q] Playboy: Are these new sexual life styles—and their practices—likely to become more widespread, or will they always be marginal behavior?

[A] Pomeroy: Why don't we take them one by one? I think traditional marriage is here to stay. The change in it will come in being more equal, more open. Group marriage will always be marginal, mainly because it's too damn complicated psychologically. Communes aren't going to be a big factor unless we have tremendous economic changes, which I can't foresee. Swinging, I think, is here to stay. There will be periods when it swings more and periods when it swings less. Right now I suspect it's sort of on the wane rather than the waxing, but I can't say why.

[A] Van Den Haag: I see group sex as becoming less prevalent in the future. Community pressure will be toward monogamous sexual relationships with a high degree of commitment. I hate to predict, but if you look at it historically, there have always been cycles along these lines.

[A] Money: As of this moment in history, I doubt that so-called infidelity in marriage is all that much different from what it was 20, 30 or 50 years ago. But I suspect it will become more acceptable in the next quarter century, that partners will be able to tolerate outside sexual experiences with less difficulty.

[A] Perry: I also feel that marriage, with some sort of legally binding contract, will always exist—even though the actual relationships between two people may drastically change. Now that women have the potential of being truly equal to males, they will no longer let a husband have the sole right to venture outside the marriage. The family may exist in some altered form; a typical one may be made up of two males and two women or three males and three women, or a dozen assorted individuals making up a small family in an honest living situation—as well as an honest sexual situation.

[A] I've seen this happen in the gay community. A friend of mine has had a relationship with one lover for 22 years. There are two other people in the household whom he also loves deeply, and he has sex relationships with them. There is a fifth party who doesn't live in the house but has had sexual relations with each of them. Now, all of my friend's sexual needs are met right there in his own household. And he's not some 20-year-old kid; he's a man in his 40s. It can work. It does work.

[A] Davis: My hopes get mixed up with my expectations; but I think Lesbianism will become more and more prevalent in the future, as more and more women see the light. Yes, I'm prejudiced. Yes, I'm proselytizing. But I'm not handing out leaflets on the corner—or, as society's stereotype of Lesbians insists, advocating the seduction of children. I simply believe there will be a natural evolution toward women loving women. I just hope it doesn't take too long.

[A] Money: I'd like to suggest something that would make a real change in relationships between straight couples. Why not start pregnancies in the early or middle teenage years, whenever it's medically advisable, and get the breeding business finished with while we're still young and resilient? And then spend the mature years doing something that's really more challenging? We've also got to do something about the problem of older people's sexuality—to say nothing of the fact that there are many more older women than older men in our society. I don't know how to provide sexual companionship for elderly ladies, but I do know they're desperate. There's a great market for gigolos in Palm Beach, because men die sooner than women. This, incidentally, is one of the best arguments for men's liberation. If we could liberate men from some of the pressures they're under, they might live longer.

[A] Dodson: I agree, John, and that's one reason I've been experimenting with role reversal. When you reverse roles, it allows you to experience the other person's role, to understand the restrictions of roles. I don't want to be like a man. That's a stupid role, just as bad as the helpless-female role. But this last year, I experimented with the role of a dude. I was walkin' tall and standin' toe to toe. I even bought a cowboy hat, and I always wear boots. If I saw someone I liked, I would initiate the sex and then run the fuck. It was my responsibility to see to our pleasure. I was always very fair. I would say what I wanted to do sexually and we'd do it, and then we would do what he wanted to do. The stud role was very heavy, but I learned a lot from it. The pressure of going to a party became anxiety-provoking; I started to feel like I had to "make out." I would walk into the room and start to cruise, and it got to be like work. I also had to cope with getting rejected and with bringing home a lousy lay. I now have a lot more sympathy for men in their difficult role of always having to pursue and initiate sex. The problem with sex roles is the restriction of living half a life—master/slave, passive/aggressive, dominant/submissive. I spent most of my life looking for my other half, and I found my other half inside myself. It's like being a whole person. I think that masturbation is the primary sexual base; it gets us through childhood, puberty, dating, marriage, heavy work periods and old age. But now that I'm responsible for my own orgasm, I find I'm even more comfortable sharing sex and sensuality with, other people.

[Q] Playboy: In your estimation, what is the ideal sexual life style—or is there such a thing?

[A] Davis: My ideal life style, which will surprise nobody by now, is unadulterated Lesbianism. If I could have my way. I would espouse total homosexuality for at least the next 200 years. We don't need procreation as much as we used to, anyway, and I believe cloning is on its way and artificial insemination would be just fine. Maybe after 200 years apart, the sexes could learn to have the kind of respect for each other and independence from each other that we don't have now. Of course, this is a utopian idea that has little chance of being achieved. But I can wish, can't I?

[A] Lovelace: I would say the trip I'm into now is the ideal sexual life style. I'm free. When I want to ball, I ball. I don't feel any kind of hang-ups about it. Like, when I want something or someone, I do it, get him or her. And I enjoy myself.

[A] Money: Whether we pick Linda's or Madeline's way or some other way, we have no choice but to try to look for a new sexual life style. The human race has to take stock of itself again. It's not an esoteric exercise we're engaged in as we sit here; it's an imperative one. The age at which puberty occurs is going down—no one knows why—at the rate of four months every ten years. In Bach's day, boys quit singing soprano when they were 17. Today they quit at 13. And on the other end of the scale, since the beginning of the century, we've had about 20 years added onto our lives, so that we live to be 70 or 80. Nobody knows where that's going to stop. On top of that, our grandfathers invented birth control—but all we've done since is refuse to talk to teenagers about it. I can give you a parallel as to what all that means: The automobile was invented about the same time as reliable birth-control devices. We've made a few concessions to that discovery, like spending billions of dollars on superhighways, but I don't need to tell you that we're still in a terrible mess, that we didn't design our whole transportation system very well after we got automobiles, and that we're still in hopeless chaos over what would be a better way to design it. Might we not also consider that it's a major challenge of our age to redesign people's mating relationships instead of borrowing them from the Bible?

[Q] Playboy: Have you any suggestions on how to go about that?

[A] Money: As one possible ideal, I like the bill proposing three-year marriages that was introduced in the Maryland state assembly last year. If either party wanted it, a marriage could be legally dissolved after that period—for any reason at all. So a lot of money wouldn't be wasted on legal fees if a couple mutually decided to end a relationship, while still providing for offspring, if any. We don't need the idea of monogamous marriage for life—till death do us part. Death used to part us much sooner than it does now. I would like to see more varieties of life style made available to people, so there's a better fit between the individuals and the styles—not this rather frenetic effort to push everybody into the same mold.

[A] Pomeroy: You're right. People are so vastly different from one another. For some people, sex outside the one intimate relationship, for example, would be meaningless or destructive. For other people, it could supply a delightful variety. I don't think you can build up an ideal sex or love life style for people. We should work toward flexibility.

[A] Simon: Agreeing with most of what Wardell and John have said so very well, I would only want to add that what we are and what we do sexually should be sufficiently connected to the rest of our lives that we are able to recognize ourselves when we're being sexual; that our sexuality not be something shadowed by silence; that it be something we don't have to hide from others, and still less from ourselves.

[A] Van Den Haag: It's very true that we cannot isolate sex from the rest of our lives. That's why I don't believe that sexual experimenters are likely to become happy through their experiments; they tend to dissociate sexual sensations from feelings. Sex becomes the technology of generating sensations, and a person who so isolates sex will go in endless search of sensation. His thirst cannot be slaked, because he has repressed the awareness that he wants love, and he has lost the ability to give and receive it, to relate to others. Using this technique on a depersonalized clitoris, or that technique on a depersonalized penis, is a poor substitute. I wouldn't hold up this disturbed behavior as the model of a life style.

[A] E. Kronhausen: To use such labels as disturbed behavior for anything that isn't to one's liking is the new way of saying something is evil or sinful. It contaminates the issue with prejudice. I find your last remark totally malapropos; it simply shows we have not been truly communicating, but talking past one another. If I can return to the question we were discussing—which was about ideal sexual life styles—I'd like the future, in many ways, to be like the recent past at a place called the Sandstone Retreat. It was a sexual paradise that could have been. First of all, it was geographically ideal, on a 15-acre site in the Topanga Hills overlooking the Pacific in Southern California. You could see the shimmering ocean over a rim of the mountains. It was really gorgeous. Beautiful grounds. A main house with teakwood floors and walls. A huge Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. The atmosphere was just perfect. Most of the members were very much into the ideology of extending love relationships outward to many other people. The emphasis was more on love than on passion or sexual excitement as we'd known it among other groups.

[A] P. Kronhausen: Two nights a week were party nights. You would get 200 or 300 transient members up there on Saturdays, and a lot of them would spend the evening and stay all through Sunday. You could pursue your own interests. You could go downstairs for general sex and fucking—and some dancing—or you could stay upstairs and sit around and talk, or play cards. As in any other good party, it was a nice balance between social contacts.

[A] E. Kronhausen: When you got tired of the sex scene, you could go into other areas, which is not common in most houses, because of the space problem. There it was ideal. The vibes were really marvelous. People's attitudes were basically so positive that you could take just about anybody up there, even a fairly uptight person, and they had to admit there was something nice about it.

[A] Dodson: I was there for a couple of weeks and I loved it. The place was physically ideal. The first party night there, about 60 beautiful people arrived and then sat around nude, having dinner; someone was playing a guitar. I had sex with a lot of people that night and it was a lot of fun. I had some interesting raps with the people who lived there. We disagreed about many things, but we allowed for our differences. John Williamson, who was the founder and director of Sandstone, feels that a sexual community has to be based on the successful pair bond; that people have to know how to relate to one person in a meaningful love relationship before they can have successful group sex. I feel that pair bonding is what keeps us from living in a more sexual community. You find your other half, become dependent and walk off into the sunset of the nuclear family.

[A] Rimmer: When I was staying at Sandstone, I would stand on the fireplace hearth, naked, and lecture about the sexual experience. Some of those sitting around me were actually making love while I spoke. Frequently, I would look down and notice a couple of girls sitting there with their legs open. It was a very casual, interesting, nonhung-up feeling. But I got into some real hot arguments with the people at Sandstone in terms of the validity of the sexual experience they were having there—people making love with strangers—vis-à-vis a long-term experience.

[Q] Playboy: Did you see the casual relationships at Sandstone as a cause of problems?

[A] Rimmer: Yes. Let me give you an example. One night while I was there, I met a dentist and his wife. She was in a state of shock at the kinds of activities she saw going on. He had a really open, easygoing sexuality, but she simply couldn't relate to anybody. One weekend in Sandstone was probably enough to blow their marriage apart. The only people who could cope with Sandstone were very liberal in their thinking to begin with, those who were not frightened by the human body or by body contact. What probably brought them there was the conscious realization that none of us gets as much sex of the kind we want as we'd like. We're constantly looking for a kind of sexual nirvana.

[A] Van Den Haag: Which probably doesn't exist. I have never seen a person with difficulties about sex who overcame his difficulties with more sex. If I could tell a patient, "See these five girls and they will liberate you from your hang-ups," it would certainly be cheaper—as well as more pleasant—than telling him to come back to my office next week, and the week after that.

[A] Dodson: There were some things that bothered me about Sandstone. A woman couldn't bring two guys with her, but a man could bring several women. Single men weren't welcome. There weren't very many young people, and the interest in food was exaggerated. But the fact that these people were experimenting with alternative life styles was beautiful.

[A] P. Kronhausen: Still, we felt that Sandstone had the potential of being the center of a whole movement toward greater fulfillment of our sexual and human potential. If you want to help people understand nudity, or group sex, you need a sort of center like Sandstone.

[A] E. Kronhausen: We thought Sandstone was marvelous and we were very sad when it closed. It lasted for only about five years.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] P. Kronhausen: One reason was community pressure, which I suspect was politically motivated, against the group nudity. Sandstone was hauled into court on a number of occasions, and the legal fees were mounting, though ultimately the case was decided in favor of Sandstone. But it fell apart, I think, not so much because of pressure as because of certain financial and organizational problems that could have been solved. People's personalities got in the way, so that they didn't want to solve them. Actually, some of us are presently trying to resurrect Sandstone, and this time, having gone through the process of purge, or self-criticism, as the Chinese would say, I think we shall succeed.

[A] Goldstein: Good luck. But if it's like it was before, count me out. To me, Sandstone sounds like little more than a summer camp populated by retarded post-adolescents whose time was running out, whose bodies wouldn't come as often as they used to. We're all getting older, and for many of us, any kind of stimulation that works is great. But some of you, my fellow panelists, need a commune like Sandstone, because you've become desensitized. If you take a certain amount of tranquilizers, you find that you ultimately need more and more to get the same effect. That's one problem with the sex revolution. As we increase the overload of new stimuli, new experiences, new delights, the body becomes insatiable. It says, "More, more, give me more." I can almost conceive of state-run camps where electrodes will be attached to our tits, balls, cocks, cunts and assholes, just to give us superthrills. How's that for Future Shock? There's another possibility, of course, and frankly, I don't know which is more frightening. Perhaps the sexual revolution will bring us so much sex—sex will become so available—that people will get their kicks out of seeking sexual denial.

[A] Dodson: Al, I have a more benevolent vision. There are about seven of us feminists living together in a collective. Our ages range from 70 to 90. Every night we gather in front of our closed-circuit TV to watch pornographic video tapes. We light the incense, get stoned, put on our earphones and plug in our vibrators for several hours of ecstasy. The rocking chairs creak, the vibrators hum and we occasionally tap each other, smiling and nodding after a particularly good orgasm.

[A] Simon: Whatever turns you on, Betty. Seriously, all of the sexual life styles we've been discussing reflect the attempts of individuals to come to grips with their own sexual needs in a society that's still basically antisexual. Furthermore, that society is organized around very narrow gender stereotypes: Boys should be boys and girls should be girls, we're taught. As these aspects of our society change—if they can be changed—some of our present sexual life styles will have little basis for existing. What bothers me, given this utopian vision, is that sex may become less significant and/or less fun. For many people, much of its capacity to be powerful still depends upon its tantalizing aura of sinfulness, or at least upon the moral ambiguities it invokes. If we lose our hang-ups, will sex become dull? I hope I'm wrong, because even if I'm not around, I hate to think the world of the future might be one in which we would be doing it more but enjoying it less.

[A] E. Kronhausen: Personally, I think we can damn well do without sexual guilt, sin and moral ambiguities.

[A] P. Kronhausen: If anything, our discussion has shown me again how little progress we've made. But then, maybe the mere fact that this kind of discussion is taking place at all is a sign of progress. At least, I'd like to think it is.

[A] Rimmer: My feeling is that we are on the threshold of a world where, instead of putting one another down as human beings, we will recognize our common sensuality. In the next quarter of a century, as a nation, we will have restated our sexual values. Since how we view sex affects our social, political and economic structure, I devoutly hope that we will put the development of an open, free, fulfilling and nonexploitive sexual life, from the cradle to the grave, at the top of the list of our national priorities.